TENDERLOIN • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Tenderloin

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/tˈɛndərlˌɔɪn/ Listen

noun

Tenderloin n.

A strip of tender flesh on either side of the vertebral column under the short ribs, in the hind quarter of beef and pork. It consists of the psoas muscles.

In New York City, the region which is the center of the night life of fashionable amusement, including the majority of the theaters, etc., centering on Broadway. The term orig. designates the old twenty-ninth police precinct, in this region, which afforded the police great opportunities for profit through conniving at vice and lawbreaking, one captain being reported to have said on being transferred there that whereas he had been eating chuck steak he would now eat tenderlion. Hence, in some other cities, a district largely devoted to night amusement, or, sometimes, to vice.

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Etymology of 'Tenderloin'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Tenderloin" Quotes from Famous Books

... underlinen, hand-made of course, was very costly. The table she set for Barry was good, but the table for herself was vastly better. Yet both tables were set on the same table. While Barry contented himself with solid round steak, Mercedes ate tenderloin. A huge, tough muttonchop on Barry's plate would be balanced by tiny French chops on Mercedes' plate. Tea was brewed in separate pots. So was coffee. While Barry gulped twenty-five cent tea from a large and heavy mug, Mercedes sipped three-dollar tea from ...

— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... in a waiter stood by a tuneless piano, upon which a bloated "professor" was beating a tattoo of cheap syncopation accompaniment of the advantages of "Bobbin' Up An' Down," which was warbled with that peculiarly raucous, nasal tenor so popular in Tenderloin resorts. The musical waiter's jaw fell in the middle of a bob, as he espied ...

— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... Mollie pushed open the screen door and said come in and set up; so I came in and set up quickly, having fried pork tenderloin and fried potatoes, and hot biscuit and pork gravy, and cucumber pickles, and cocoanut cake and pear preserves, peach preserves, apricot preserves, loganberry jelly, crab-apple jelly, and another kind of preserves ...

— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... surrounded by a horde of savages who needed no greasepaint to stain their ebony bodies, and many of whose grinning countenances I had often recognized along our own Tenderloin. Besides, there were cowboys and "greasers" and diving elks, and a company of French Zouaves; the latter, in fact, seemed to be the only thing foreign about the show. Our friend, the manager, informed us that he had thrown ...

— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith

... their incidents, are always sung in a plaintive minor which goes oddly with the large-moulded virility of the singers. Some are sentimental, or religious, to the last degree, while others reek with an indecency of speech that would shroud the Tenderloin in blushes. Both kinds are equally popular in the camps, and both are of the most astounding naivete. Of the worst of them, even, the simple-minded woodsmen are not in the least ashamed. They seem ...

— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts

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