Other forms: feeding, fed, feeds
To feed is to give food to a person or an animal. Feed the cat, feed a baby, feed five thousand people. It is irregular: feed, fed, fed.
It also works from the other side: a baby feeds, cattle feed on grass. And it extends to anything supplied steadily — feed paper into a printer, feed information to a journalist, feed a fire. The noun is busy in modern English: a feed is animal food, a baby's meal, and the stream of posts on a social media app, which is now probably its commonest use of all. Note fed up, meaning tired of something, which is a fixed phrase and takes with.
1verbfeedTo give food to a person or animal.
“She feeds the birds every morning.”
synonyms: nourish
2verbbabyOf an animal or baby, to eat.
“The lambs feed on whatever grass there is.”
3verbsupplyTo supply something steadily into a machine or a process.
“Feed the sheets in one at a time.”
4nounstreamA stream of updates or posts.
“Nothing but adverts on my feed this morning.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
feed is a way of supplying food.
Old English fedan comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to guard or graze — the same root as food, fodder, foster and pasture. Feeding and looking after were one idea before they were two.
Proto-Indo-European
*peh₂- — to guard, graze, feed
Proto-Germanic
*fōdijaną — to feed
Proto-West Germanic
*fōdijan
Old English
fēdan — to feed
Middle English
feden
English, today
feed
From Middle English feden, from Old English fēdan (“to feed”), from Proto-West Germanic fōdijan, from Proto-Germanic fōdijaną (“to feed”), from Proto-Indo-European peh₂- (“to guard, graze, feed”). Cognate with West Frisian fiede (“to nourish, feed”), Dutch voeden (“to feed”), Danish føde (“to bring forth, feed”), Swedish föda (“to bring forth, feed”), Icelandic fæða (“to feed”), and more distantly with Latin pāscō (“feed, nourish”) through Indo-European. More at food, fodder.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA