Definitions

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

  • noun Fish sperm, including the seminal fluid.
  • noun The reproductive glands of male fishes when filled with this fluid.
  • transitive verb To fertilize (fish roe) with milt.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The male generative organ of a fish; the spermatic organ and its secretion; the soft roe, corresponding to the roe or spawn of the female. Sometimes melt.
  • To impregnate the roe or spawn of (the female fish).
  • noun In anatomy, the spleen.

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

  • noun The spermatic fluid of fishes.
  • noun The testes, or spermaries, of fishes when filled with spermatozoa.
  • noun (Anat.) The spleen.
  • transitive verb To impregnate (the roe of a fish) with milt.

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

  • noun The spleen, especially of an animal bred for food.
  • noun Fish semen.
  • verb transitive To impregnate (the roe of a fish) with milt.

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

  • noun fish sperm or sperm-filled reproductive gland; having a creamy texture
  • noun seminal fluid produced by male fish

Etymologies

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

[Middle English, spleen, milt, probably partly from Middle Dutch milte, spleen, milt, and partly from Old English milte, spleen; see mel- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English milte, milt ("milt, spleen"), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)meld- (“to beat, grind, crush, weaken”). Cognate to German Milz, Dutch milt, Danish milt, Norwegian milt, Swedish mjölke. Outside Germanic, with Albanian mëlçi ("liver").

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Examples

Comments

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  • reesetee alert: a prime candidate for "Worse Than They Sound."

    "There is almost no waste to a cod.... Icelanders used to eat the milt, the sperm, in whey. The Japanese still eat cod milt. Stomachs, tripe, and livers are all eaten, and the liver oil is highly valued for its vitamins."

    —Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Penguin, 1997), 34

    July 14, 2009

  • Eeew. Added.

    July 14, 2009

  • "After salmon started coming to the nets, the food improved. Valentina made sautéed salmon steaks, and a soup of salmon heads and potatoes called ukha, and fried salmon liver and salmon milt with kasha, and salmon eggs and butter on thinly sliced black bread."

    Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier, p 104

    February 9, 2011