offal

From Middle English offal (“offal, refuse, scrap waste”), possibly from Old Norse affall (“offal”), or from Middle English of- +‎ fal(l), equivalent to off- +‎ fall. Cognate with Danish affald (“waste, refuse”), Swedish avfall (“waste, refuse”), Dutch afval (“waste, refuse”), German Abfall (“waste, refuse”), Old English offeallan (“to cut off”). More at off, fall.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈɒfl̩/
  • Rhymes: -ɒfəl
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈɔfl̩/
• (US, cot–caught merger, Canada) IPA^(key): /ˈɑfl̩/
  • Rhymes: -ɔːfəl
  • Homophone: awful

offal (countable and uncountable, plural offals)

1. The rejected or waste parts of a butchered animal.
2. The internal organs of an animal other than a bird, these organs being used as food.
3. A by-product of the grain milling process, which may include bran, husks, etc.
   • 1817, John Taylor, Arator; Being a Series of Agricultural Essays Practical and Political in Sixty-One Numbers, Baltimore: John M. Carter, No. 32, Indian Corn, p. 96,

     The whole of the corn offal is better food than wheat straw, but its blades and tops are so greatly superiour, that cattle prefer them to hay, and will fatten on them as well.

   • 1918, Alonzo Englebert Taylor, War Bread, New York: Macmillan, p. 75,

     Our standard wheat flour contains only the endosperm and represents practically a 75 per cent. extraction. The remaining 25 per cent. is known in the trade as grain offal or mill-feed, and is used largely as a concentrated food for live stock, being prized in the feeding of dairy cattle.

   • 1941, Wheat Studies of the Food Research Institute, Stanford University, Volume 18, p. 96,

     […] the fragments are broken down and the finer particles are collected by sieving; finally, there is the bolting of the assembled fine fractions, with exclusion of the wheat offal which includes bran and a number of other commercial fractions like red dog and shorts.

4. A dead body.
5. Carrion.
6. That which is thrown away as worthless or unfit for use; refuse; rubbish.

• giblets