pickle-herring

English edit

Noun edit

pickle-herring (plural pickle-herrings)

(obsolete) A herring preserved in brine; a pickled herring.
- c. 1601–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Twelfe Night, or What You Will”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene i]:
  'Tis a Gentleman heere. A plague o'these
  pickle herring: How now Sot.
(obsolete) A Merry Andrew; a buffoon.
- 1714 September 25 (Gregorian calendar), [Joseph Addison], “TUESDAY, September 14, 1714”, in The Spectator, number 599; republished in Alexander Chalmers, editor, The Spectator; a New Edition, […], volume VI, New York, N.Y.: D[aniel] Appleton & Company, 1853, →OCLC:
  The first who made the experiment was a merry-andrew, who was put into my hands by a neighbouring justice of peace, in order to reclaim him from that profligate kind of life. Poor Pickle-herring had not taken above one turn in it, when he came out of the cave, like a hermit from his cell, with a penitential look and a most rueful countenance.
  The spelling has been modernized.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “pickle-herring”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)