keech

Compare dialectal English keech (“cake”), perhaps ultimately a back-formation from Middle English kechel (“small cake”).

• IPA^(key): /kiːt͡ʃ/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

keech (plural keeches)

1. (obsolete) A mass or lump of fat rolled up by the butcher.
   • 1613 (date written), William Shakespeare, [John Fletcher], “The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eight”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i]:

     I wonder
     That such a keech can with his very bulk
     Take up the rays o' th' beneficial sun,
     And keep it from the earth.

   • 1889, Heywood Walter Seton-Karr, Ten Years' Wild Sports in Foreign Lands: Or, Travels in the Eighties:

     I observed them [natives of British Columbia] on another occasion content with merely warming keeches of raw and solid flesh under their naked armpits.

• “keech”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

• Cheek, cheek

keech (uncountable)

1. alternative spelling of kich

• “keech”, in The Dictionary of the Scots Language, Edinburgh: Scottish Language Dictionaries, 2004–present, →OCLC.