Citations:ribspare
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
English citations of ribspare
- (rare, modern uses dialectal) Sparerib.
- 1726, John Stevens, A New Dictionary, Spanish and English, and English and Spanish, Much More Copious than Any Other hitherto Extant. [...][1], London: Printed for J. Danby [et al.], →OCLC:
- A bald rib, or ribſpare of a hog, Entrecuéſta.
- 1874, Samuel Pegge, “An Alphabet of Kenticisms, Containing 600 Words and Phrases in a Great Measure Peculiar to the Natives and Inhabitants of the County of Kent; together with the Derivations of Several of them. To which is Added a Collection of Proverbs and Old Sayings, which are either Used in, or do Relate to the said County.”, in Archæologia Cantiana: Being Transactions of the Kent Archæological Society, volume IX, London: Printed for the [Kent Archaeological] Society, by Mitchell & Hughes, Wardour Street, Oxford Street, →OCLC, page 95:
- Ribspare, sb. the spare rib.
- 2006, editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries, More Word Histories and Mysteries: From Aardvark to Zombie, Boston, Mass., New York, N.Y.: Houghton Mifflin Company, →ISBN, page 219:
- Alongside the forms of the word [sparerib] like spar-rib, English also had the untransposed form ribspare, which persisted in English dialects even into the 1800s. Even though ribspare, directly reflecting Low German ribbesper, is attested a bit later than sparerib, it may perhaps have been the original form in which the word was borrowed, and the transposed forms like sparerib may have been created from ribspare as a result of folk etymology.
- 2009, Susie Dent, “Urban Myths and Folk Origins”, in What Made the Crocodile Cry?: 101 Questions about the English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 124:
- Why are spare ribs ‘spare’ in the first place? The first part of spare ribs actually has nothing to do with the English sense of ‘spare’. The term started off, many centuries ago, in northern Germany, where the term was ribbesper (the anglicized ‘ribspare’ is still found in some very local English dialects), which consisted of pickled pork ribs roasted on an open spit.