† cackerel ? Obs.
(ˈkækərəl)
Also 7 cackarel, cackrel.
[a. obs. F. caquerel (also cagarel, cagaret) Cotgr., ad. Pr. cagarel, cagarello (also, according to Duhamel, gagarel, whence Cuvier's specific name gagarella); app. f. Pr. cagar:—L. cacāre (see cack v.), with which the name is popularly associated.
(Variously etymologized as ‘a fish which voids excrements when pursued’ or ‘which when eaten relaxes the bowels’; M. Paul Meyer suggests that the name is merely one of contempt = ‘méchant petit poisson’, ‘poisson chétif’. The allied Mæna is now in Pr. picarel, dim. of picaro ‘rogue, rascal’.)]
1. A small fish of the Mediterranean: the name is applied by the fishermen of Marseilles and Toulon to Smaris gagarella (Cuv.), and perhaps to other similar species of the same genus of small sea-breams. Early writers used the word to english Pliny's mæna ‘a kind of small sea-fish, eaten salted by the poor’, now the name of a genus closely akin to Smaris.
| 1583 J. Higins tr. Junius' Nomenclator, Mæna.. a cackrell, so called, because it maketh the eaters laxative: some take it for a herring or sprat. 1601 Holland Pliny I. 249 Cackarels change their colour: for these fishes being white all Winter, wax blacke when Summer comes. Ibid. II. 442 Salt Cackerels. 1632 Sherwood Eng.-Fr. Dict., A cackerell (fish), cagarel, caquerel, cagaret, juscle: bocque, mandole, mendole, mene. 1634 Sir T. Herbert Trav. 187 Fish, whose ordinary abode is in salt waters, namely porpoise,—cackrel, skate, soles, etc. 1721–90 in Bailey. 1755 Johnson, Cackerel, a fish said to make those who eat it laxative. |
2. [as if f. cack.] Dysentery (F. caquesangue).
| 1659 Howell Lex. Tetrag. It. Prov. 19 May the Cackrel take him [transl. It cacasangue]. |