Definitions

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

  • noun A Scottish dish consisting of a mixture of the minced heart, lungs, and liver of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the slaughtered animal.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A dish made of a sheep's heart, lungs, and liver, minced with suet, onions, oatmeal, salt, and pepper, and boiled in a bag, usually the stomach of a sheep.
  • noun A sheep's head and pluck minced.

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

  • noun A Scotch pudding made of the heart, liver, lights, etc., of a sheep or lamb, minced with suet, onions, oatmeal, etc., highly seasoned, and boiled in the stomach of the same animal; minced head and pluck.

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

  • noun a traditional Scottish dish made from minced offal and oatmeal etc, boiled in the stomach of a sheep etc; traditionally served with neeps and tatties and accompanied with whisky.

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

  • noun made of sheep's or calf's viscera minced with oatmeal and suet and onions and boiled in the animal's stomach

Etymologies

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

[Middle English hagese; perhaps akin to haggen, to chop; see haggle.]

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Examples

Comments

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  • Great chieftain o' the pudding-race!

    February 13, 2007

  • I'll see your haggis and raise you a black pudding!

    October 25, 2008

  • Love a's pronunciation! Almost makes it sound edible!

    December 2, 2009

  • Really? I think it just sounds jarring. It nearly blew me out of my seat.

    ;)

    I've eaten haggis and it was actually pretty good. I think it was probably some horribly processed Americanized haggis, though—if such a thing even exists—and would not be surprised to try it in Scotland someday and find out it doesn't taste at all like the kind I had.

    December 2, 2009

  • The vegetarian haggis is excellent.

    December 2, 2009

  • Can only be the word that causes the jocularity, for the dish itself is scrumptious, esp. with tatties'n'neaps. Och, and an 80/- ale, or a malt.

    December 3, 2009

  • Haha! I like that pronunciation too. Although I did eat haggis once (in Scotland), I still wouldn't get near it again if you paid me.

    December 3, 2009

  • bilby: :-)

    December 3, 2009

  • "It sometimes happens that the bladder bursts during cooking and spills out it contents. To avoid this, wrap the haggis in a napkin, as if it were a galantine, before putting it into boiling water." - from Alfred Suzanne's recipe for haggis in his book La Cuisine Anglaise

    June 26, 2010

  • See Vegetarian Haggis.

    September 15, 2010

  • Usage/historical note can be found on spices but since that has so many comments, I'll just put it here too for convenience:

    "Spices hung on in isolated pockets, but they were not what they had once been. Today the astute culinary archaeologist can still find such relics as spiced bread in Devon, and further north there is a plethora of richly spiced puddings--Scotland's national dish, the spicy haggis, is essentially a medieval pudding. Scandinavia and the Baltic have preserved several remnants of medieval cooking, largely in biscuits, breads, cakes, and liqueurs...."

    --Jack Turner, _Spice: The History of a Temptation_ (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 303

    December 6, 2016