fillet

From Middle French filet, ultimately from Latin fīlum (“thread”).

• enPR: fĭ'lĭt, IPA^(key): /ˈfɪ.lɪt/, /ˈfɪˌleɪ̯/
• (General American) (meat senses) IPA^(key): /fɪˈleɪ/

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• Rhymes: -ɪlɪt, -eɪ

fillet (plural fillets)

1. (now rare) A headband; a ribbon or other band used to tie the hair up, or keep a headdress in place, or for decoration.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I.iii:

     In secret shadow, farre from all mens sight: / From her faire head her fillet she undight, / And laid her stole aside.

   • Alexander Pope

     A fillet binds her hair.

   • 1970, John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse, Mew York 2007, p. 42:

     She was talking of Raymond Duncan, a walking absurdity who dressed in an ancient handwoven Greek costume and wore his hair in long braids reaching to his waist, adding, on ceremonial occasions, a fillet of bay-leaves.

2. A thin strip of any material, in various technical uses.
3. (construction) A heavy bead of waterproofing compound or sealant material generally installed at the point where vertical and horizontal surfaces meet.
4. (engineering, drafting, CAD) A rounded relief or cut at an edge, especially an inside edge, added for a finished appearance and to break sharp edges.
5. A strip or compact piece of meat or fish from which any bones and skin and feathers have been removed.
6. (architecture) A thin flat moulding/molding used as separation between larger mouldings.
7. (architecture) The space between two flutings in a shaft.
8. (heraldry) An ordinary equal in breadth to one quarter of the chief, to the lowest portion of which it corresponds in position.
9. The thread of a screw.
10. A border of broad or narrow lines of colour or gilt.
    • 1911, George Sterling, The Swimmers‎:

      Fairer than gods and naked as the moon, The foamy fillets at their ankles strewn Less marble-white than they

11. The raised moulding around the muzzle of a gun.
12. (woodworking) Any scantling smaller than a batten.
13. (anatomy) A fascia; a band of fibres; applied especially to certain bands of white matter in the brain.
14. The loins of a horse, beginning at the place where the hinder part of the saddle rests.

• (a boneless cut of meat): filet

• (rounded outside edge): round

• chicken fillet

• Fillet in the 1921 edition of Collier's Encyclopedia.

fillet (third-person singular simple present fillets, present participle filleting, simple past and past participle filleted)

1. (transitive) To slice, bone or make into fillets.
2. (transitive) To apply, create, or specify a rounded or filled corner to.

• (make into fillets): bone, debone