Word.ws English Dictionary

chew the meat and spit out the bones

chew the meat and spit out the bones verb: to take in a great deal of information and selectively disregard some of it as invalid or inapplicable.

Verb

chew the meat and spit out the bones (third-person singular simple present chews the meat and spits out the bones, present participle chewing the meat and spitting out the bones, simple past and past participle chewed the meat and spat out the bones or chewed the meat and spit out the bones)

  1. (idiomatic) To take in a great deal of information and selectively disregard some of it as invalid or inapplicable.
    • Do not swallow every story that is told. There may be a grain of truth somewhere in all the myths, but chew the meat and spit out the bones.2002, A. Frank Goepel, A Realm Without Rules, page 116

Forms of chew the meat and spit out the bones

third-person singular presentchews the meat and spits out the bones
present participlechewing the meat and spitting out the bones
past participlechewed the meat and spat out the bones
pastchewed the meat and spat out the bones
past participlechewed the meat and spit out the bones
pastchewed the meat and spit out the bones

Questions about chew the meat and spit out the bones

What does chew the meat and spit out the bones mean?
Chew the meat and spit out the bones means to take in a great deal of information and selectively disregard some of it as invalid or inapplicable.
What part of speech is chew the meat and spit out the bones?
Chew the meat and spit out the bones is a verb.
What is the past tense of chew the meat and spit out the bones?
The past tense of chew the meat and spit out the bones is chewed the meat and spat out the bones.

Words near chew the meat and spit out the bones in the dictionary

  1. chew stick
  2. chew sticks
  3. Chew Stoke
  4. chew the cud
  5. chew the fat
  6. chew the meat and spit out the bones
  7. chew the rag
  8. chew the scenery
  9. chew toy
  10. chew toys
  11. chew up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: chew the meat and spit out the bones (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-chew the meat and spit out the bones.ogg.

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