bacon
- 1Meat from the sides, belly or back of a pig, preserved by curing.
The farm cures its own bacon with salt and brown sugar.
She browned some diced bacon with onions before adding the beans.
Note
At root this is back meat: Middle English bacoun named meat from the back and sides of a pig, and the word traces through Anglo-Norman, where it also meant ham or a flitch, to a Germanic word for the back, the root of English back itself. As food it is usually uncountable: some bacon, diced bacon, fish fried with bacon.
- 2Cured pork from the sides, belly or back of a pig, sliced thin into long strips.
Lay the bacon flat on a baking sheet so the strips cook evenly.
The diner's club sandwich comes with four crisp strips of bacon.
- 3The police or spies, referred to with contempt.
Somebody must have called the bacon, because two squad cars showed up within minutes.
Watch what you say on the phone, the bacon might be listening.
Similarpolice, cops, fuzz, pigs
Note
People who resent the police use this name for them, usually as a group and with the: run, it's the bacon! It can cover spies as well, anyone watching on the authorities' behalf. Since the contempt is the point, it belongs in rough talk among people who share it, not in front of an officer or in writing meant to be taken seriously.
- 4In cycling slang, road rash: skin scraped raw by sliding across the road surface in a crash.
Two riders went down on the wet corner and finished the stage with bacon on their hips and shoulders.
Scrubbing the grit out of his bacon hurt more than the crash itself.
Note
Cyclists borrowed the breakfast word for skin scraped raw in a crash, and the likeness to raw meat is the joke. Like road rash, it is a mass noun, so a rider finishes a stage with bacon on a hip or a shoulder, never a bacon. It belongs to club rides and race talk rather than to a medical report.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English bacoun ("meat from the back and sides of a pig"), from Anglo-Norman bacon, bacun ("ham, flitch, strip of lard"), from Old Low Frankish *bakō ("ham, flitch"), from Proto-Germanic *bakô, *bakkô ("back"), the source of English back, and ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeg- ("back, buttocks; to vault, arch"). It is related to Old Saxon baco ("back"), Dutch bake and Old High German bahho ("ham, side of bacon"). The police sense is an extension of pig ("police").