Other forms: salmons
Salmon is a large pink-fleshed fish that hatches in rivers, lives at sea and swims back upriver to breed. Smoked salmon, wild salmon, a salmon leaping.
The l is silent — SAM-un — which is one of the more surprising English pronunciations and a reliable giveaway. The plural is usually salmon, unchanged. Note salmon as a colour, a pale pinkish orange, and the distinction between wild and farmed, which matters to price and to conservation. The upriver journey is one of the best known facts in natural history and gives the phrase swimming upstream its force.
1nounsalmonA large pink-fleshed fish that breeds in rivers and lives at sea.
“The salmon come up the river in autumn.”
2nounpaleA pale pinkish-orange colour.
“The walls are a sort of salmon that nobody chose deliberately.”
salmon is a fish, or a colour.
Latin salmo may come from salire, to leap — the leaping fish, named for the thing everybody notices about it. The silent l in English was put back into the spelling by scholars who knew the Latin, long after English had stopped saying it.
Latin
salmo
Old French
saumon
Anglo-Norman
saumon
Middle English
samoun
English, today
salmon
From Middle English samoun, samon, saumon, from Anglo-Norman saumon, from Old French saumon, from Latin salmo. Widely displaced native Middle English lax, from Old English leax (whence modern dialectal lax). The unpronounced l was later inserted to make the word appear closer to its Latin root (compare words like debt, indict, receipt for the same spelling Latinizations). The verb sense ride a bicycle the wrong way down a one-way street alludes to salmon swimming upstream against the flow of a river to spawn.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA