flesh

Etymology

From Middle English flesh, flesch, flæsch, from Old English flǣsċ, from Proto-West Germanic *flaiski, from Proto-Germanic *flaiski, from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₁ḱ- (“to tear, peel off”).

noun

1. The soft tissue of the body, especially muscle and fat.
   The flesh of chicken, fowl, and turkey has much shorter fibre than that of ruminating animals, and is not intermingled with fat,—the fat always being found in layers directly under the skin, and surrounding the intestines. 1918, Fannie Farmer, Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Chapter XVII: Poultry and Game
2. The skin of a human or animal.
3. (by extension) Bare arms, bare legs, bare torso.
4. Animal tissue regarded as food; meat (but sometimes excluding fish).
5. 8 May 2018, Raj Patel, Jason W Moore, “How the chicken nugget became the true symbol of our era”, in The Guardian:
6. The human body as a physical entity.
7. (religion) The mortal body of a human being, contrasted with the spirit or soul.
   1929 January, Bassett Morgan (Grace Jones), Bimini, first published in Weird Tales, reprinted 1949, in Avon Fantasy Reader, Issue 10, But death had no gift for me, no power to free me from flesh.
8. (religion) The evil and corrupting principle working in man.
9. The soft, often edible, parts of fruits or vegetables.
   The flesh of black walnuts was a protein-packed winter food carefully hoarded in tall, stilted buildings. 2003, Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Arboretum America: A Philosophy of the Forest, page 81
10. (obsolete) Tenderness of feeling; gentleness.
11. (obsolete) Kindred; stock; race.
12. A yellowish pink colour; the colour of some Caucasian human skin.
    She opened … a third that was the peachy white that crayon companies used to call “flesh”. 2018, Tayari Jones, An American Marriage, Oneworld Publications, page 243
    flesh:

verb

1. (transitive) To reward (a hound, bird of prey etc.) with flesh of the animal killed, to excite it for further hunting; to train (an animal) to have an appetite for flesh.
2. (transitive) To bury (something, especially a weapon) in flesh.
   Give me a clean sword and a clean foe to flesh it in. 1933, Robert E. Howard, The Scarlet Citadel
3. (obsolete) To inure or habituate someone in or to a given practice.
4. (transitive) To glut.
5. (transitive) To put flesh on; to fatten.
6. To remove the flesh from the skin during the making of leather.