Other forms: meals
A meal is the food eaten at one sitting. Three meals a day, cook a meal, a proper meal.
The three-meal pattern is a convention rather than a necessity, and the names and timings vary sharply within Britain — dinner is midday in some regions and evening in others, with tea and supper doing different work in each. Note make a meal of it, meaning to make something more complicated than it needs to be; and that meal in the sense of ground grain is a separate word.
1nounmealThe food eaten at one sitting.
“We usually eat our main meal of the day in the evening.”
Patterna + adjective + meal (hot, light, square) · cook / skip / share a meal · mealtime · a meal out
meal is an eating occasion.
MEAL → a REAL sit-down meal
Not a bite in front of the television: a real meal, at the table, with everybody sitting down together.
hooks ontoreal
Old English mael meant a measure or an appointed time, and then a time for eating. The word for ground grain is a different Old English word, melu, related to mill.
Proto-Indo-European
*meh₁- — to measure
Proto-Germanic
*mēlą
Proto-West Germanic
*māl
Old English
mǣl — measure, time, occasion, set time, time for eating, meal
Middle English
mel
English, today
meal
From Middle English mel, from Old English mǣl (“measure, time, occasion, set time, time for eating, meal”), from Proto-West Germanic māl, from Proto-Germanic mēlą, from Proto-Indo-European meh₁- (“to measure”). Cognate with West Frisian miel, Dutch maal (“meal, time, occurrence”), German Mal (“time”), Mahl (“meal”), Norwegian Bokmål mål (“meal”), Swedish mål (“meal”); and (from Proto-Indo-European) with Ancient Greek μέτρον (“measure”), Latin mensus, Russian ме́ра (“measure”), Lithuanian mẽtas. Related to Old English mǣþ (“measure, degree, proportion”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA