middle piecen.

1682 A. Radcliffe Ramble 127 But why had not thy hungry Maw been eas'd, If Tosborough or Taylor thou hadst seiz'd; Those single parts of Middle-piece and Rump, Insatiate thou! to fall upon the Chump.

1723 J. Nott Cook's & Confectioner's Dict. sig. Gg3 Take a piece of fresh Salmon, either Tail or Middle-piece.

1866 H. M. Bouvier National Cook Bk. 53 Take a nice middle piece of young pork, separate the joints and crack the bones across the middle, but do not break the skin.

1902 E. Banks Autobiogr. Newspaper Girl 161 Your Boston beans done in an earthen pot with the middle-piece pork just rightly browned.

1817 Sporting Mag. 50 54 Randall closed this round by a terrible blow in the middle-piece.

1846 ‘Lord Chief Baron’ Swell's Night Guide (new ed.) 125/2 Middle piece, the stomach.

1843 Ld. G. Bentinck in Racing Life (1892) ix. 201 Colonel Anson says he is a very clever horse, and one that must run, but thinks him rather small in the middle-piece.

1891 H. S. Constable Horses, Sport & War 63 A horse with big ends and a small middle-piece is more likely to become a roarer than a horse with a good middle piece and thence a good constitution.

1895 Jrnl. Morphol. 11 237 Since the middle piece or ‘Nebenkern’ of the echinoderm spermatozoön is formed from the mitotic spindle, the term ‘mitosome’, introduced by Platner, has been adopted and will be used to designate the middle piece, = Nebenkern = corpuscle accessoire of other writers.

1901 Jrnl. Morphol. 17 326 Before the middle-piece is even in contact with the egg.

a1933 J. A. Thomson Biol. for Everyman (1934) I. xx. 574 The ripe spermatozoa are typical, that is to say, they have..a ‘head’..a locomotor ‘tail’ and..a middle-piece between the two, which bears a centrosome with an important rôle in the division of the fertilized egg-cell.

1984 L. W. Browder Developmental Biol. (ed. 2) vi. 229 The middle piece of the [mammalian] sperm is characterized by a sheath of elongate mitochondria that are wrapped end-to-end in a helical chain around the axoneme.