DCHP-1 Online
cut throat cut-throat 
1 n. in preparing fish for salting, the person who guts the fish and all but severs its head, making it ready to be snapped off by the header.
- 1818 Each salting-house is provided with one or more tables, around which are placed wooden chairs and leathern aprons, for the cut-throats, headers, and splitters.
- 1861 The first person on the stage engaged in curing fish is the "cut-throat," with his double-edged knife; the next is the "header," who dislocates the neck, and forces the head of the fish off, which falls into the water through a hole cut in the table.
- 1965 The man nearest the box, the "cut-throat," reaches down, grasps a fish and holding by a finger in each eye . . . he makes a lightning-quick cut across the throat from gill to gill and then a second longitudinal cut, ripping down the belly and allowing the entrails to spill out. He then pushes the fish over to the "header."
2 n. a large trout of western Canada, Salmo clarkii, so called from a red streak under each side of the lower jaw.
See also: cutthroat trout
- 1907 The cut-throat is unknown to me. I have never caught it in British Columbian waters, unless some fish mentioned later in the accounts of the Nicola River belong to this species.
- 1963 The cutthroats could start feeding on the first hatches of pink salmon fry in the sloughs and lower reaches of the rivers.
- 1818 Each salting-house is provided with one or more tables, around which are placed wooden chairs and leathern aprons, for the cut-throats, headers, and splitters.