Word.ws English Dictionary

bare navy

bare navy noun: the situation where available food is limited to basic service rations.

Noun

bare navy (uncountable)

  1. (UK, slang) The situation where available food is limited to basic service rations.
    • "Three weeks we had been at sea on bare Navy, when we dropped anchor off Porthaven," said Long Jim. "Bare Navy, you understand, is regulation rations and nothing else, the canteen having run dry; […]1914, Leslie Cope Cornford, Echoes from the Fleet, page 62
    • A tragic memory of Edwardian times, when butter or even margarine was a luxury in the Navy. Living on bare Navy symbolized having to exist on the coarse fare supplied by the Service.1946, Edwin Radford, Unusual Words and how They Came About, page 15

Questions about bare navy

What does bare navy mean?
Bare navy means the situation where available food is limited to basic service rations.
What part of speech is bare navy?
Bare navy is a noun.

Words near bare navy in the dictionary

  1. bare minima
  2. bare minimum
  3. bare minimum Monday
  4. Bare Minimum Mondays
  5. bare minimums
  6. bare navy
  7. bare necessities
  8. bare noun
  9. bare nouns
  10. bare one's breast
  11. bare one's heart

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bare navy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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