Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A salted and cured side of bacon.
  • noun A longitudinal cut from the trunk of a tree.
  • noun One of several planks secured together to form a single beam.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The side of an animal (now only of a hog) salted and cured: chiefly used in the phrase a flitch of bacon.
  • noun A steak from the side of a halibut, smoked or ready for smoking.
  • noun In carpentry, a plank or slab; especially, one of several planks fastened side by side to form a compound beam.
  • To cut into flitches: as, to flitch hogs; to flitch halibut.
  • noun A strap; a doubling-plate; a fishing-bar; a metal or wooden plate bolted to a beam or girder at a joint or other weak spot, to strengthen it and keep it straight when exposed to endwise thrust.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The side of a hog salted and cured; a side of bacon.
  • noun One of several planks, smaller timbers, or iron plates, which are secured together, side by side, to make a large girder or built beam.
  • noun engraving The outside piece of a sawed log; a slab.
  • transitive verb To cut into, or off in, flitches or strips.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The side of an animal, now only a pig when cured and salted; a side of bacon.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun salted and cured abdominal wall of a side of pork
  • noun fish steak usually cut from a halibut

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English flicche, from Old English flicce.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Old English fliċċe, from Proto-Germanic *flikjan.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word flitch.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • 1. A salted and cured side of bacon.

    2. A longitudinal cut from the trunk of a tree.

    3. One of several planks secured together to form a single beam.

    Wonder which meaning came first?

    July 11, 2007

  • Good word...so good, I had to filch it.

    July 11, 2007

  • "... the name of a piece of small timber, supplied to ships for the purpose of sawing up into boat timber; so called, perhaps, from its small parts resembling a flitch of bacon."

    Falconer's New Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1816), 154

    Looks like maybe the bacon meaning came first, reesetee.

    October 11, 2008

  • "Before the hard days of winter set in, he slaughtered the pig, and for a week stayed at home with the job of butchering. The dogs feasted on bones and scraps, and Pell roasted the head. Dogman salted the flitches and sold the rest."

    The Bride's Farewell by Meg Rosoff, p 144

    June 26, 2010