Gaspareau

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A herring-like fish of the Atlantic coast of North America, also known as the alewife, that migrates upstream to spawn
2. An anadromous fish related to herring, found along eastern North American coasts and known locally in Atlantic Canada as the alewife
3. A silvery migratory fish of the herring family that lives in Atlantic North America and returns to freshwater rivers to breed

Etymology: Gaspareau is the name of a North American herring-family fish, Alosa pseudoharengus, better known as alewife. The name is not English in origin. It comes from Canadian French, where "gaspareau" was applied to the fish in the Maritime region, and it is generally traced to a Mi'kmaq or other Algonquian-speaking source, though the exact route from that language to French is uncertain. The word has a particular home in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, where the fish runs up rivers every spring and has long been a local food and bait source. In that region "gaspareau" is the everyday name, while "alewife" is more common in the United States and in standard dictionaries.

Synonyms: alewife, gaspereau