• collop •
Printable Version Pronunciation: kah-lêp • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. A slice or chunk of meat. 2. A fold or flab of body fat indicating a well-fed condition. 3. An egg fried on a piece of ham or bacon, especially if eaten on Collop Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday.
Notes: Today's word is an endangered lexical orphan, homeless, wandering the streets of Scotland and northern England all alone. In the overweight world we currently live in, the word is too relevant to let slip away—or leave it to the Scots to have all the fun with.
In Play: Should your mum ask your pleasure at the dinner table, impress her with, "Perhaps I would like, say, three collops of the roast beef." But do not confuse it with dollop "a lump or portion"; their meanings are very close. We don't like to think of collops on ourselves, but they do sometimes appear: "Barb Dwyer is a lovely woman except the for collops under her chin." Pigs are a natural place to find the collops whether in the sty or on the table. In fact, a pig might be described as the larval stage of a football with dollops of collops all over it. Or not, as you please.
Word History: 
The origin of this word is rather obscure. It is related to Swedish kalops "beef stew" and German Klops "meatball", though no one knows exactly how. It may be a variant of scallop, also spelled scollop in some parts of the English-speaking world. This word was taken from the French word escalope "shell", which also refers to a slice of meat, perhaps because it curls like a shell when cooked. Unfortunately, there is no explanation of why English would drop the initial S from this word.
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