Mead

How to spell mead

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mead

What does mead mean?

1. nounAn alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey with water, sometimes flavoured with fruit or spices.

Mead in a sentence

• The local brewery sells a sweet mead made from wildflower honey.

• At the medieval banquet they served roast meat and goblets of mead.

Where does mead come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The drink sense of mead descends from the Old English meodu, the name for an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey with water. It is one of the most ancient words in the Germanic family, with close relatives in Old Norse mjǫðr, German Met, and Dutch mee, and it reaches even further back to an Indo-European root that also gave Sanskrit madhu, meaning 'honey' or 'sweet drink'. Mead was a staple of early Northern European feasting culture, which is why the great hall in Old English poetry such as Beowulf is called a meoduheall, a 'mead hall'. A second and now poetic sense of mead, meaning a meadow, comes from a completely different Old English word, mǣd, which is the older form behind 'meadow' and is related to 'mow', the cutting of grass. Because both senses collapsed to the same four letters and the same sound, modern readers meet two words that look identical but have unrelated histories.

How the word is built

• mead (from Old English meodu: fermented honey drink); a single, unanalysable root with no prefix or suffix