Other forms: meads
Mead is an old alcoholic drink made from honey. A horn of mead, brew mead, drink mead.
It is probably the oldest alcoholic drink there is, since honey ferments with almost no help, and it appears in Norse and Anglo-Saxon poetry as the drink of the hall. It has come back as a craft product. The word is Indo-European and very old indeed.
1nounmeadAn alcoholic drink made from honey.
“In the Viking hall, the warriors drank mead from horns.”
mead is a drink.
Old English medu comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning honey or honey wine, found from Sanskrit to Greek.
Proto-Indo-European
*médʰu — honey; honey wine
Proto-Germanic
*meduz
Proto-West Germanic
*medu
Old English
medu
Middle English
mede
English, today
mead
From Middle English mede, from Old English medu, from Proto-West Germanic medu, from Proto-Germanic meduz, from Proto-Indo-European médʰu (“honey; honey wine”). Cognate with Ancient Greek μέθυ (whence English methyl), Lithuanian medùs, cu медъ (“honey”), Persian می, Sanskrit मधु, Welsh medd, Finnish mesi, Chinese 蜜.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA