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A sausage is a type of meat product usually made from ground meat—often pork, beef, or poultry—along with salt, spices and other flavourings. Other ingredients, such as grains or breadcrumbs may be included as fillers or extenders. When used as an adjective, the word sausage can refer to the loose sausage meat, which can be formed into patties or stuffed into a skin. When referred to as “a sausage”, the product is usually cylindrical and encased in a skin. Typically, a sausage is formed in a casing traditionally made from intestine, but sometimes from synthetic materials. Sausages that are sold raw are cooked in many ways, including pan-frying, broiling and barbecuing.

Sausage-making is a traditional food preservation technique. Sausage making is a natural outcome of efficient butchery. An Akkadian cuneiform tablet records a dish of intestine casings filled with some sort of forcemeat. Traditionally, sausage casings were made of the cleaned intestines, or stomachs in the case of haggis and other traditional puddings. A sausage consists of meat cut into pieces or ground, mixed with other ingredients, and filled into a casing.

Ingredients may include a cheap starch filler such as breadcrumbs or grains, seasoning and flavourings such as spices, and sometimes others such as apple and leek. In some jurisdictions foods described as sausages must meet regulations governing their content. They are composed of solid fat globules, dispersed in protein solution. The proteins function by coating the fat and stabilizing them in water. This section needs additional citations for verification. Sausages classification is subject to regional differences of opinion. Various metrics such as types of ingredients, consistency, and preparation are used.