Oatmeal

How to spell oatmeal

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce oatmeal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does oatmeal mean?

1. nounGround or rolled oats, or the hot breakfast porridge made by cooking them.
2. nounA pale, greyish fawn colour resembling that of uncooked oats, often used to describe fabric or paint.

Oatmeal in a sentence

• She stirred a bowl of oatmeal on the stove before her morning shift.

• They painted the spare room a soft oatmeal to keep it neutral.

• The recipe calls for a cup of oatmeal to thicken the cookie dough.

• She chose a sweater in oatmeal rather than stark white.

Where does oatmeal come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound joining two very old native words. The first part, 'oat', comes from the Old English 'ate', a word for the cereal grass and its grain whose deeper origins are obscure even to scholars. The second part, 'meal', has nothing to do with a sitting-down dinner; it descends from the Old English 'melu', meaning grain that has been ground into a coarse powder, and it is a close relative of the verb 'to mill' and of German 'Mehl', meaning flour. Put together, 'oatmeal' literally names ground oats, and the compound is recorded in English from the 1400s. The 'ea' spelling in the 'meal' element is the same vowel pattern found in 'meal', 'real', and 'steal', which is the only small trap in an otherwise plain word.

How the word is built

• oat (the cereal grain)
• meal (coarsely ground grain, from Old English melu)