Word.ws English Dictionary

eat one's Wheaties

eat one's Wheaties verb: to prepare or fortify oneself for an activity requiring exertion.

Verb

eat one's Wheaties (third-person singular simple present eats one's Wheaties, present participle eating one's Wheaties, simple past ate one's Wheaties, past participle eaten one's Wheaties)

  1. (Canada, US, idiomatic) To prepare or fortify oneself for an activity requiring exertion.
    • But he just couldn't get the ball through the goal posts (poor Harry . . . he didn't eat his Wheaties, or else his shoe was on backwards).1971 October 19, Haney Reilly, “Another game, another loss but Hawkeyes looked better”, in Telegraph-Herald, Iowa, USA, retrieved 01 Jul 2011, page 17
    • Jo-Ann Wonsik answered a Herald want ad for a career requiring day after day of heavy lifting. . . . "And you've got to eat your Wheaties on this job," she said.1994 September 11, “Garbage Collector Lifts Away Worries”, in Miami Herald, page 1B

Forms of eat one's Wheaties

third-person singular presenteats one's Wheaties
present participleeating one's Wheaties
pastate one's Wheaties
past participleeaten one's Wheaties

Origin of eat one's Wheaties

An allusion to the breakfast cereal Wheaties, long advertised as the "Breakfast of Champions", and its long-standing association with sports celebrities.

Questions about eat one's Wheaties

What does eat one's Wheaties mean?
Eat one's Wheaties means to prepare or fortify oneself for an activity requiring exertion.
What part of speech is eat one's Wheaties?
Eat one's Wheaties is a verb.
What is the past tense of eat one's Wheaties?
The past tense of eat one's Wheaties is ate one's Wheaties.

Words near eat one's Wheaties in the dictionary

  1. eat one's own
  2. eat one's own dog food
  3. eat one's pride
  4. eat one's seed corn
  5. eat one's terms
  6. eat one's Wheaties
  7. eat one's words
  8. eat one's young
  9. eat out
  10. eat out of someone's hand
  11. eat out of the palm of someone's hand

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: eat one's Wheaties (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-eat one's Wheaties.ogg.

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