Word.ws English Dictionary

bed and board

bed and board noun: a place to sleep and eat; bed and breakfast; the services provided by an inn or similar establishment.

Noun

bed and board (uncountable)

  1. A place to sleep and eat; bed and breakfast; the services provided by an inn or similar establishment.
    • For, alas, the Ideal always has to grow in the Real, and to seek out its bed and board there, often in a very sorry way. No beautifullest Poet is a Bird-of-Paradise, living on perfumes; sleeping in the aether with outspread wings. The Heroic, independent of bed and board, is found in Drury Lane...1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “ch. 4, Abbot Hugo”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, →OCLC, book II (The Ancient Monk)
  2. Full connubial relations.

Origin of bed and board

From Middle English bed and bord.

Words formed from bed and board

Questions about bed and board

What does bed and board mean?
Bed and board means a place to sleep and eat; bed and breakfast; the services provided by an inn or similar establishment.
What part of speech is bed and board?
Bed and board is a noun.

Words near bed and board in the dictionary

  1. becushioned
  2. becut
  3. becuts
  4. becuz
  5. bed
  6. bed and board
  7. bed and breakfast
  8. bed and breakfasts
  9. bed bath
  10. bed baths
  11. bed blocker

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bed and board (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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