Definitions

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

  • noun An Inuit or Yupik knife having an arched blade fixed to a central handle, used especially for skinning, chopping, and carving.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A kind of semilunar knife used by Eskimo women.

Etymologies

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

[Inuit.]

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Examples

Comments

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  • "Artefacts have also surfaced, making suggestions about how people lived in Nuvuk. Here, a body holds an ulu, a traditional knife used for taking blubber from whale carcasses; there, a grave gives up weights from a bolus which would have been used to hunt birds."

    - 'Bodies Point To Alaska's Past', Richard Black, BBC website 31 Dec 2007.

    January 1, 2008

  • Ulu: Jungle, Glossary of Words, "Green Beret, Red Star" by Anthony Crockett, London 1954, Eyre & Spottiswoode

    May 19, 2008

  • According to Chris Cole in Wordplay, the shortest (with two others, uku & utu) "uncommon word" beginning and ending with letter 'u'.

    June 2, 2008

  • "My grandmother loved breadfruit. For years, I thought Ulu had to be cooked in the ashes of a fire, wrapped in foil or ti leaf, so that the edges burned just a little and the insides were chewy and brown."

    - The Breadfruit Cookbook.

    October 20, 2009

  • Usage/note in comment on umiak.

    January 24, 2017