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kelt

/kɛlt/noun

kelt is a noun meaning “A thin, recently spawned iteroparous salmon” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled K-E-L-T, and it appears about once in every 21 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of kelt is kelts.

What does kelt mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A thin, recently spawned iteroparous salmon.

  2. 2

    ScotlandCloth with the nap, generally of native black wool.

  3. 3

    Pronunciation spelling of kilt.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce kelt?

  • /kɛlt/

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Forms of kelt

  • kelts plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is kelt?

Kelt appears about once in every 21 million words in written English, the 139,999th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Kelt in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense recently spawned Atlantic salmon:

LanguageWords
Spanishsalmón zancado

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does kelt come from?

Compare Icelandic kult (“quilt”).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).