Definitions

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

  • noun Finely chopped and seasoned meat, especially pork, usually stuffed into a prepared animal intestine or other casing and cooked or cured.
  • noun A small cylinder-shaped serving of this meat.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An article of food, consisting usually of chopped or minced meat, as pork, beef, or veal, seasoned with sage, pepper, salt, etc., and stuffed into properly cleaned entrails of the ox, sheep, or pig, tied or constricted at short intervals. When sausages are made on an extensive scale the meat is minced and stuffed into the intestines by machinery.
  • noun In milit. mining, a canvas tube filled with powder.
  • noun plural A commercial name for crude rubber in finger- or sausage-shaped pieces. See rubber, 3.

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

  • noun An article of food consisting of meat (esp. pork) minced and highly seasoned, and inclosed in a cylindrical case or skin usually made of the prepared intestine of some animal.
  • noun A saucisson. See Saucisson.

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

  • noun A food made of ground meat (or meat substitute) and seasoning, packed in a cylindrical casing. Also a length of sausage, or an example of a sausage.
  • noun A sausage-shaped thing.
  • noun colloquial Penis.
  • noun A term of endearment.

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

  • noun highly seasoned minced meat stuffed in casings
  • noun a small nonrigid airship used for observation or as a barrage balloon

Etymologies

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

[Middle English sausige, from Anglo-Norman sausiche, from Vulgar Latin *salsīcia, from Late Latin, neuter pl. of salsīcius, prepared by salting, from salsus, salted; see sauce.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From late Middle English sausige, from Anglo-Norman saussiche (compare Jèrriais saûciche), from Late Latin salsīcia (compare Spanish salchicha, Italian salsiccia), neuter plural of salsīcius ("seasoned with salt"), derivative of Latin salsus ("salted"), from sal ("salt"). More at salt.

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Examples

Comments

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  • see also--when good sausages get together to hang out--sausage fest

    February 18, 2007

  • The best pizza topping ever.

    February 18, 2007

  • See also makkara.

    November 16, 2008

  • A friend of mine who likes sn- words like snout, snore, sniffle, and snort, likes to call sausages "snausages" as a nod to the pork content of same.

    September 17, 2009

  • I wonder if snausages are tinny.

    September 17, 2009

  • "Another common food seldom found at the tables of the wealthy was sausage or any meat flavored and made less perishable by means of salting, drying, smoking, or pickling. Even if spices had been used to preserve meat (which they were not), the resulting products, today considered delicacies, would have been regarded as hopelessly rustic or at best middle class. Although a tremendous amount of attention is now given to various Iberian, Italian, and German hams like jamon jabugo, Bundnerfleisch, or prosciutto, these were originally designed to save meat over winter and so not favored by those with the resources to serve fresher meat during the normally hard months. Sausages were thought of as typical of prosperous urban nobodies (merchants and the like), or of affluent peasants. It seems that in every late-medieval or Renaissance woodcut depicting a peasant wedding (and there are many), the guests are gobbling up sausages while a dog is running off with a string of them snatched from a table."

    Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2008), 41.

    This last image is particularly interesting to me since it also appears in many silent/B&W films and in cartoons.

    Also more about peasant food in comment on dairy and vegetables.

    November 27, 2017

  • Sausage, a portmanteau of <i>sow</i> and <i>sage</i>, from the meat of a sow (swine) originally spiced with sage.

    February 28, 2020