to flense
1
9.9
To remove the thick skin and fat from whales or seals
- verb
- /flɛnz/
- NSFW
:
desollar
- After the hunters returned, they began to flense the skin from the caught whale to prepare it for processing.
Examples
-
I'd rather be flensed and flayed... than spend another hour with Forge Fitzwilliam.
-
I could see from the air that half of Captain Paradox's roof was missing, flensed from the four walls as though by some impossibly sharp carving knife.
Fiction book (1997) -
The crew worked tirelessly to flense the blubber from the massive whale they had caught.
-
It took several hours to flense the seal, as the process required great skill and care.
Synonyms
9
9.3
To cut the skin off a person or animal, often for punishment and before cooking
targets blubber or skin of large sea mammals specifically
Surface Forms
Etymology
Flense comes from a Dutch or old Norse word flensen meaning 'to strip off skin or blubber'. So, to flense a whale is to 'strip' its blubber—much like the everyday English word flay—and that is why it means removing skin or blubber today.