Meal

How to spell meal

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce meal

What does meal mean?

1. nounAn occasion of eating food, or the food served and eaten at that time.
2. nounGrain or other edible matter that has been ground into a coarse powder.

Meal in a sentence

• The hotel rate includes one evening meal each day.

• The recipe calls for a cup of fine corn meal.

• She cooked a hot meal for the whole family after work.

• The mill produced bags of coarse bone meal for the garden.

Where does meal come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The everyday food sense comes from the Old English word mael, which originally meant a measure, a mark, or a fixed point in time rather than food itself. Because eating happened at appointed times of the day, the word gradually narrowed to mean the food taken at one of those scheduled occasions, and the older sense of an appointed time survives in the word 'piecemeal', meaning bit by bit. It is a native Germanic word with close cousins such as German Mahl and Dutch maal. A quite separate Old English word, melu, meaning ground grain or flour, fell together with this spelling and gives us the second modern sense found in 'oatmeal' and 'cornmeal'; that grain word is related to 'mill' and 'meal' in the sense of grinding. Both strands are old native English vocabulary, which is why the spelling stayed short and simple, with the long vowel marked by the 'ea' pairing.

How the word is built

• meal (from Old English mael: a measure, an appointed time, hence the food taken at that time)