humbles

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular present of humble.

   Defeat humbles even the most arrogant champion.

   The sheer scale of the canyon humbles everyone who stands at its rim.

   Note

   The form used with he, she or it: defeat humbles him; the canyon humbles every visitor. The verb usually takes an object and is often reflexive, as when someone humbles himself before others, though it can also stand without one. The same spelling also names a deer's entrails, a separate word with an unrelated origin.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of humble.

   Note

   Two quite different nouns share this plural. In slang, a humble is an arrest made on weak evidence to demean or punish someone, so repeated arrests of that kind are humbles. In Northern England and Scotland, humble is also a variant of hummel. Neither should be confused with the cook's humbles, which belong to the deer's entrails.

3. 3
   nounarchaicplural

   The internal organs of a deer, especially the heart, liver, and other parts taken as food after a hunt.

   Like the giblets pulled from a chicken before roasting.

   After the kill, the cook set aside the humbles for a savory pie.

   Servants were often given the humbles while the lords kept the venison.

   Note

   A word from the hunting kitchen that exists only in the plural. There is no single humble of this kind, so it always takes a plural verb: the humbles were set aside. It comes from numbles, and with umbles it lies behind the idiom to eat humble pie, which named the pie once made from these parts. It is archaic now and suits historical or period writing.

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