kidney
Pluralkidneys
- 1An organ that filters the blood to remove waste and produce urine.
Each kidney filters waste products from the blood around the clock.
Surgeons removed the damaged kidney and replaced it with a donor organ.
Note
A name of obscure origin: Middle English kidnēre is probably a compound of a word for "belly, womb" (Old English cwiþ) and nēre, an older word for the kidney itself. The organ's name has also come to cover a machine. An artificial kidney is not an organ at all but a dialysis device that mimics the way real kidneys cleanse the blood.
- 2An animal's kidney, used as food: for instance in dishes like steak and kidney pie.
The recipe calls for lamb kidneys simmered in red wine.
He ordered grilled kidney with mustard sauce at the restaurant.
- 3A person's constitution, temperament, or type: the basic character that places them among a particular kind of people.
Politicians of that kidney rarely admit when they are wrong.
Millions in the World of this Man's Kidney
1692, Roger L’Estrange, FablesSimilarstamp, ilk, sort, type, temperament
Note
A figure that turns the organ into a type of person, and it lives in one construction: of that kidney, of my kidney. Shakespeare uses it in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Burns, writing to Robert Ainslie in 1788, mocks "poets, spendthrifts, and other fools of that kidney." T.S. Eliot is still playing with it in A Cooking Egg (1920). Today it sounds dated and usually wry, so it works best for ironic effect.
Less common meaning
- 4A servant or attendant who waits on guests, bringing them food and drink at the table.
The kidney hurried between the crowded tables with a tray of mugs.
A young kidney took our coats and showed us to a bench by the fire.
Note
Slang from the early eighteenth century, long out of use. Richard Steele's The Tatler (1709) has it in a passage about what it costs to send a man daily to Will's, White's and the Grecian. Because the word is obsolete, it belongs only in historical writing or pastiche. A modern reader will hear the organ first and may miss the joke entirely.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English kedney, of obscure origin and formation. It is probably a compound of Middle English *kid ("belly, womb," from Old English cwiþ) and nēre ("kidney," from Old English *nēora, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *neurô and Proto-Indo-European *negʷʰr-), making it related to Dutch nier, German Niere, and Ancient Greek nephrós. An alternate etymology traces the first element to Old English *cydde ("sack, belly, scrotum"), since terms for testicle and kidney were often interchangeable in Germanic.