stirabout
- noun
- Archaic
:
gachas
- The children enjoyed their stirabout topped with honey and berries.
Examples
-
Mary Cougan served stirabout from a witch's pot and strong tea from tannin-colored crockery.
Fiction book (1995) -
Forcing Eva to eat the stirabout.
-
May you unflinchingly go on stirabouts throughout your days.
Academic text (2005) -
For breakfast, she prepared a steaming bowl of stirabout made with fresh oatmeal.
-
After stirring the cornmeal into boiling milk, he served the thick stirabout to his family.
Synonyms
80
1.0
Soft cooked oats eaten for breakfast
27
1.0
Soft warm food made by boiling oats in milk or water until thick
18
3.6
A soft thick porridge made from cornmeal
1
4.0
A thick hot porridge made by boiling cornmeal in water
A hot sweet porridge you make by boiling cornmeal or oats with milk and usually eat with syrup
How Thick
Surface Forms
Morphology
stirabout = stir (semi-transparent) = about + stir
The components 'stir' + 'about' are clear and suggest something stirred, but the conventionalized dialectal meaning 'porridge' is a specialized lexicalization not directly predictable by the parts. [Postprocessing: moved 'about' from base_words to prefix]
Etymology
The word stirabout comes from the action of stir + about, meaning 'to move around' or 'mix', because you stir the oats 'about' in the pot. So, a stirabout is a porridge made by stirring, which makes it easy to remember as a warm, thick breakfast dish.