Late Middle English, of North Germanic origin, from Swedish kalops (“stewed meat”), from Old Swedish kollops (“slices of beef stew”). Cognate to German Klops (“dish of meat made tender by beating”).
Meanings
(Northern-England) A slice of meat.
"It was till lately believed by the ploughmen of Clydesdale, that if they repeated the rhyme
Fairy, fairy, bake me a bannock and roast me a collop,
And I'll gie ye a spurtle off my gadend!
three several times on turning their cattle at the terminations of ridges, they would find the said fare prepared for them on reaching the end of the fourth furrow." 1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 353:
Late Middle English, of North Germanic origin, from Swedish kalops (“stewed meat”), from Old Swedish kollops (“slices of beef stew”). Cognate to German Klops (“dish of meat made tender by beating”).
Meanings
To cut into collops (thin slices)
I neither egged thee nor colloped thee. If I had egged thee, though mights yet chese. 1979, Lester Barber, Misogonus: Edited with an Introduction:
They colloped it, and spitted skilfully, Then roasted carefully and slipped them off. 1874, Homer (J.B. Rose, translator), Homer's Iliad. Translated [into English Blank Verse] by J. B. Rose, page 433:
This induced me to make a further trial, and to get some of them colloped as we do oysters in shells, I swallowed them up myself. 1773, Philosophical Transactions, Giving Some Account of the Present Undertakings, Studies and Labours of the Ingenious in many Considerable Parts of the World, page 385:
There was one fine bullock already butchered and being colloped by the cooking fires of the Burns and several sheep on the way to the same fate. 2016, P.F. Chisholm, A Chorus of Innocents: