Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A young Atlantic salmon on its first return from the sea to fresh or brackish waters.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A young salmon on its first return to the river from the sea.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Zoöl.) A young salmon after its first return from the sea.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A young
salmon after its first return from the sea.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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"Some of them are much larger than small salmon; but by the term grilse I mean young salmon that have only been once to sea.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843 Various
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A grilse is a young salmon returning from the sea to fresh water for the first time - true or false?
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A grilse is a young salmon returning from the sea to fresh water for the first time - true or false?
December 2007 2007
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Most of the salmon caught are known as grilse -- small, mostly male salmon that feed only a few hundred kilometres away from their home rivers.
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Most of the salmon caught are known as grilse -- small, mostly male salmon that feed only a few hundred kilometres away from their home rivers.
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In the third stage, after its return from the sea to its native river, it is called a "grilse," and weighs from three to six pounds.
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But in those places, their absence didn't seem pretentious, as it did in the third one-star eatery, Plumed Horse (www. plumedhorse.co.uk) — for here both the bread and the grilse (young salmon) were undersalted to my taste.
From Ships to Michelin Stars Paul Levy 2010
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But there was still a grilse that rose to a big March brown in the shrunken stream below Elibank.
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Atlantic salmon native to Maine rivers had virtually no grilse in their spawning runs.
Trout and Salmon of North America Robert J. Behnke 2002
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From area to area and year to year, spawning runs have grilse and older adults in different proportions.
Trout and Salmon of North America Robert J. Behnke 2002
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Some of these fattened one-winter salmon, now known as ‘grilse’, will begin to make their way back to the redds of their birth, drawn by the scent of familiar waters that was imprinted on their sensory systems during the outbound stage of the journey.
Richard Hamblyn · Simply Putting on Weight: Salmon · LRB 25 February 2010 Richard Hamblyn 2019
chained_bear commented on the word grilse
"Intrepid anglers, travelling by train from St. John's and Port aux Basques, ate poached salmon and pan-fried grilse and char—sold by local fishermen to the railway cooks for nine cents a pound."
—David Macfarlane, The Danger Tree, 62
May 6, 2008