Past tense or adjective form meaning stripped of blubber or fat, as with a whale or seal that has been processed by whalers.
From flench plus -ed suffix, forming the past participle; used in whaling contexts to describe animals that have been processed.
The whale hunting industry left us dozens of specialized words like 'flenched'—these words were so specific to that dangerous, brutal work that many have almost completely vanished from modern English.
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