Barmecide feast
Barmecide feast noun: a meal with very little or no food.
Noun
Barmecide feast (plural Barmecide feasts)
- A meal with very little or no food
- [H]e decided that his loved one was on the point of starvation. No human being, he held, could exist on such Barmecide feasts.1915, P.G. Wodehouse, chapter 8, in Something Fresh, London: Hutchinson, page 122
- Arthur Rimbaud, in a hotel dining room where, though indulging in a Barmecide feast before empty plates and glasses, he evinces the most evident signs of gastronomic enjoyment.1935, Milton H Stansbury, “The Surrealists”, in French Novelists of Today, University of Pennsylvania Press, pages 121-136
- Something that promises much but delivers nothing; an illusion.
Forms of Barmecide feast
| plural | Barmecide feasts |
|---|
Origin of Barmecide feast
From a tale in the Arabian Nights in which a rich man serves a beggar an imaginary banquet; see Barmecide.
Questions about Barmecide feast
- What does Barmecide feast mean?
- Barmecide feast means a meal with very little or no food.
- What part of speech is Barmecide feast?
- Barmecide feast is a noun.
- What is the plural of Barmecide feast?
- The plural of Barmecide feast is Barmecide feasts.
Words near Barmecide feast in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Barmecide feast (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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “Barmecide feast.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/barmecide_feast. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.