mutton chops
1
5.3
- noun
- /ˈmʌtən tʃɑps/
:
patillas
- Everyone laughed when he styled his hair to match his mutton chops, creating a playful look.
- mutton chops sideburns
Examples
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At the costume party, he wore a wig and fake mutton chops to resemble a 19th-century gentleman.
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The detective noted the suspect had distinctive mutton chops that made him easy to identify.
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He appears very stern and has mutton chop sideburns.
Fiction book (1999) -
A knock on the door preceded a balding, rotund man sporting mutton-chop sideburns.
Blog text (4)
Synonyms
32
4.3
A strip of hair on each side of the face in front of the ear
1
3.7
Hair grown on the sides of the face in front of the ears
1
7.9
A strip of hair on each side of a man's face in front of the ears
Facial hair where long sideburns run down the face in front of the ears
Thick sideburns that grow down the cheeks and join along the jaw, with no mustache
Facial hair that grows thick along the jaw and down the cheeks
How Long
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase relies on a visual metaphor: sideburns that look like a cut of mutton (mutton + chops), so there is a clear link between the constituents and the intended image. However, the leap from ‘meat cut’ to ‘facial hair’ is culturally specific and not fully predictable for an average B1 learner who knows only the literal words, making the expression partially but not fully transparent.
Etymology
Mutton chops for facial hair likely comes from a simple picture: the wide, curved sideburns look like a pair of mutton chops hanging down the cheeks, so the name came to mean 'sideburns that are grown thick and long'.