beef tongue

1 3.4

A cow's tongue that is cooked and eaten as meat

noun
/biːf tʌŋ/

: lengua de res

Not too many people eat beef tongue.
slices of beef tongue

Examples

I'll have the beef tongue, please.
Her favorite dish at the restaurant is the beef tongue served with creamy potatoes.
I'll have the beef tongue, please.

Fiction book (1995)
We're going to have some beef tongue that should taste pretty good, but it's just weird to eat the tongue.
Beef tongue is delicious.

Blog text (25)
Recently one of my head chefs put this dish on the menu, a beef tongue sandwich on rye with bone marrow soup.
Juicy, spicy, shredded beef barbacoa is great here, and the beef head and beef tongue are meltingly soft with strong, straightforward flavor.

Blog text (5)
Probably, beef tongue is the easiest organ to eat. I boil it until it is ready (it takes a while), remove the skin under running cold water, slice, and reheat before eating with garlic and sour cream; it is also good in chili.

Blog text (28)
Today's special features a delicious beef tongue sandwich served with horseradish sauce.

Synonyms

tongue

vsbeef tongue

660 1.0

A soft movable part in the mouth used for tasting, eating, and speaking

refers to that same mouth part when prepared and eaten as food

langue

vsbeef tongue

1 9.9

The tongue of an animal eaten as food

is the specific cow version prepared and eaten as meat

Surface Forms

beef tongue singular

beef tongues plural

Morphology

beef + tongue

The meaning 'the tongue of a cow prepared and eaten as meat' is directly compositional from 'beef' (meat from a cow) + 'tongue' (the organ), so a learner who knows both words can infer it. This noun-noun food composition is cross-linguistically common and follows a standard English pattern, making it immediately understandable to a B1 learner.

Etymology

Beef tongue is simple: it names the tongue of a cow (the beef) that people cook and eat. That's why beef tongue means 'the tongue of a cow prepared and eaten as meat'.