Word.ws English Dictionary

bread and water

bread and water noun: an extremely meager or straitened diet, as of an ascetic, penitent or prisoner.

Noun

bread and water

  1. (dated) An extremely meager or straitened diet, as of an ascetic, penitent or prisoner.

Questions about bread and water

What does bread and water mean?
Bread and water means an extremely meager or straitened diet, as of an ascetic, penitent or prisoner.
What part of speech is bread and water?
Bread and water is a noun.

Words near bread and water in the dictionary

  1. bread and honey
  2. bread and milk
  3. bread and roses
  4. bread and salt
  5. bread and scrape
  6. bread and water
  7. bread and wine
  8. bread bag
  9. bread bags
  10. bread basket
  11. bread baskets

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bread and water (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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