Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The edible flesh of animals, especially that of mammals as opposed to that of fish or poultry.
  • noun The edible part, as of a piece of fruit or a nut.
  • noun The essence, substance, or gist.
  • noun Slang Something that one enjoys or excels in; a forte.
  • noun Nourishment; food.
  • noun The human body regarded as an object of sexual desire.
  • noun The genitals.
  • idiom (meat and potatoes) The fundamental parts or part; the basis.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun plural The trade-name for cottonseed from which the remains of fiber (‘lint’) and husk (‘hulls’) have been removed and which is ready for crushing.
  • To supply with food; feed.
  • An obsolete spelling of meet.
  • noun Food in general; nourishment of any kind.
  • noun Solid food of any kind: as, meat and drink.
  • noun The flesh of warm-blooded animals ordinarily killed for food; butcher-meat; flesh-meat: as, to abstain from meat but eat fish on Friday: in a narrower sense, the flesh of mammals used for food: as, to prefer meat to fowl or fish; bear-meat; deer-meat.
  • noun The edible part of something: as, the meat of an egg, of a nut, or of a shell-fish: sometimes with a plural: as, the meats of nuts or of oysters.
  • noun The taking of food or a meal; the act of eating meat, in the original sense of the word: as. grace before meat.
  • noun Dinner.
  • noun An animal or animals collectively, as used or hunted for food: as, to kill meat for an exploring party. [Local.]
  • noun Meat which must be well cooked, leaving no trace of bloodiness, as veal.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Food, in general; anything eaten for nourishment, either by man or beast. Hence, the edible part of anything.
  • noun The flesh of animals used as food; esp., animal muscle.
  • noun obsolete Dinner; the chief meal.
  • noun See under Biscuit.
  • noun (Mining) vegetable mold.
  • noun (Zoöl.) See Flesh fly, under Flesh.
  • noun (Script.) an offering of food, esp. of a cake made of flour with salt and oil.
  • noun [Obs.] to go to a meal.
  • noun to sit at the table in taking food.
  • transitive verb obsolete To supply with food.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A meathead.
  • noun Australian Aboriginal A totem; metonymy for its owner(s).

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the choicest or most essential or most vital part of some idea or experience
  • noun the inner and usually edible part of a seed or grain or nut or fruit stone
  • noun the flesh of animals (including fishes and birds and snails) used as food

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English mete, from Old English, food.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Old English mete, cognate with Frisian mete, Old Saxon meti, Old High German maz ("food"), Old Icelandic matr, Gothic 𐌼𐌰𐍄𐍃 (mats), from a Proto-Germanic *matiz. A -ja- derivation from the same base is found in Middle Dutch and Middle Low German met ("lean pork"), whence Modern Low German Mett ("minced meat") (whence 16th c. German Mettwurst ("a kind of sausage"))

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word meat.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • The unit of currency for the Kingdom of Loathing MMORPG.

    September 7, 2008

  • Are veggies the cents to the meat's dollar?

    Depending on your view of meat, this page is quite funny and/or horrifying with image search turned on. I'm having a renewed flirtation with image search in general, since rediscovering it while poking around c_b's dinosaurology lists.

    September 7, 2008

  • *buries head*

    September 7, 2008

  • JM knows that red meat is not bad for you – it’s the fuzzy green meat that’s bad for you.

    July 17, 2011