Word.ws English Dictionary

feed

/fiːd/

feed verb: to give (someone or something) food to eat. Also the simple past and past participle of fee.

feed: to give (someone or something) food to eat
Image: Giles Laurent, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Verb

feed (third-person singular simple present feeds, present participle feeding, simple past and past participle fed)

  1. (transitive) To give (someone or something) food to eat.
    • Feed the dog every evening.
    • If thine enemy hunger, feed him.1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Romans 12:20
    Synonyms:
    nourish
  2. (intransitive) To eat (usually of animals).
    • Spiders feed on gnats and flies.
    • “The treasurer was of the same opinion: he showed to what straits his majesty’s revenue was reduced, by the charge of maintaining you, which would soon grow insupportable; that the secretary’s expedient of putting out your eyes, was so far from being a remedy against this evil, that it would...1726 October 28, [Jonathan Swift], Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. […] [Gulliver’s Travels], volume I, London: […] Benj[amin] Motte, […], →OCLC, part I (A Voyage to Lilliput)
  3. (ditransitive) To give (someone or something) to (someone or something else) as food.
    • Don't feed him too much; he's still a baby.
    • Feed the fish to the dolphins.
  4. (transitive) To give to a machine to be processed.
    • Feed the paper gently into the document shredder.
  5. (transitive) To supply (a machine) with something to be processed.
    • We got interesting results after feeding the computer with the new data.
  6. (figuratively, transitive) To satisfy, gratify, or minister to (a sense, taste, desire, etc.).
    • If I can catch him once upon the hip, / I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.c. 1596–1598 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...
    • feeding him with the hope of liberty1603, Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, […], London: […] Adam Islip, →OCLC
  7. (transitive) To supply with something.
    • Springs feed ponds with water.
    • The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed1817 (published 11 January 1818), Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Sonnet. Ozymandias.”, in [Mary] Shelley, editor, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. […], volume III, London: Edward Moxon […]...
  8. (transitive) To graze; to cause to be cropped by feeding, as herbage by cattle.
    • If grain is too forward in autumn, feed it with sheep.
    • Once in three years, or every other year, feed your mowing-lands.1707, J[ohn] Mortimer, The Whole Art of Husbandry; or, The Way of Managing and Improving of Land. […], London: […] J[ohn] H[umphreys] for H[enry] Mortlock […], and J[onathan] Robinson […], →OCLC
  9. (transitive) To pass to.
    • Morrison then played a pivotal role in West Brom's equaliser, powering through the middle and feeding Tchoyi, whose low, teasing right-wing cross was poked in by Thomas at the far post2010 December 28, Kevin Darlin, “West Brom 1-3 Blackburn”, in BBC
  10. (transitive) To create the environment where another phonological rule can apply; to be applied before (another rule).
    • Nasalization feeds raising.
  11. (transitive) To create the syntactic environment in which another syntactic rule is applied; to be applied before (another syntactic rule).

Noun

feed (countable and uncountable, plural feeds)

  1. (uncountable) Food given to (especially herbivorous) non-human animals.
    • They sell feed, riding helmets, and everything else for horses.
  2. Something supplied continuously.
    • a satellite feed
  3. The part of a machine that supplies the material to be operated upon.
    • the paper feed of a printer
  4. The part of a fountain pen that supplies ink to the nib.
  5. The forward motion of the material fed into a machine.
  6. (Australia, New Zealand, UK, colloquial, countable) A meal.
    • 184?, Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor
      One proposed going to Hungerford-market to do a feed on decayed shrimps or other offal laying about the market; another proposed going to Covent-garden to do a 'tightener' of rotten oranges, to which I was humorously invited; […]
    • "There won't be any more blessed concerts for a million years or so; there won't be any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds at restaurants."1898, H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, page 257
  7. (countable) A gathering to eat, especially in large quantities.
    • They held a crab feed on the beach.
    Synonyms:
    feast
  8. (Internet, syndication or aggregation) antichronological sequence of posts or articles from a single source, especially as consumable on a platform other as originally published.
    • I've subscribed to the feeds of my favourite blogs, so I can find out when new posts are added without having to visit those sites.
  9. (Internet, often, social media) content intended for consumption by scrolling or swiping, especially as a home page and from multiple publishers followed or algorithmically curated
    • Refresh the top of your various “feeds” — the running column of content on some versions of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram — and you will see the latest news at the top. The further back you scroll, the older the material gets.2016 March 15, Mike Isaac, “Instagram May Change Your Feed, Personalizing It With an Algorithm”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
    • I use Native, that’s what other Native people on Facebook use. I have 660 friends. Tons of Native friends in my feed. Most of my friends, though, are people I don’t know, who’d happily friended me upon request.2018, Tommy Orange, “Edwin Black”, in There There, New York, N.Y.: Vintage Books, →ISBN, page 69
  10. A straight man who delivers lines to the comedian during a performance.
    • Don Ward is often described as a former comic, having some experience in this area as a young man, acting as a feed for the comic actor David Lodge at Parkins Holiday Camp in Jersey […]2020, Oliver Double, Alternative Comedy: 1979 and the Reinvention of British Stand-Up, page 38

Also used as

feed is also the simple past and past participle of fee.

feed meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

feed in Hindi

to give food to eat
खिलाना khilānā
encapsulated online content
फ़ीड fīḍ

feed in Tamil

to give food to eat
ஊட்டு ūṭṭu

feed in Marathi

to give food to eat
भरवणे bharavṇe

feed in Urdu

to give food to eat
کھلانا khilānā
More languagesFewer languages
feed in Telugu
తినిపించు tinipiñcu
feed in Malayalam
തീറ്റ tīṟṟa
feed in Gujarati
ફીડ phīḍ
feed in Odia
ଖାଇବାକୁ ଦେବା
feed in Assamese
খুৱা khua
feed in Nepali
खुवाउनु khuwāunu
feed in Tagalog
pakainin
feed in Arabic
أَطْعَمَ ʔaṭʕama, غَذَّى ḡaḏḏā
feed in Malay
suapan
feed in Indonesian
memberi makan, pasokan, umpan
feed in Persian
غذا دادن ġazâ dâdan
feed in Thai
ขุน kǔn, หล่อเลี้ยง lòr líang, ป้อน bpɔ̂ɔn
feed in Vietnamese
cho ăn, nguồn cấp
Sindhi
کارائڻ khara'inu, فيڊ feed, کائڻ kha'inu, فيڊ ڪرڻ

Examples of feed in a sentence

  • If we have time we might go on to Brighton, feed at the 'Ship,' and come back in the cool.1914, Ernest Bramah, Max Carrados:
  • While feeding, the basking shark swims at about two knots per hour, and this enables it to eat and breathe in the same motion.1983, Richard Ellis, The Book of Sharks, Knopf, →ISBN, page 89:
  • Well, we’ll see if Larry can find you a feed of beef when the billy’s boiled.’1937, Ion L. Idriess, Over the Range, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, published 1947, page 111:
  • We shouldn’t have been surprised; our divisions have been in front of our faces and inside our feeds this whole time.2020 November 24, Charlie Warzel, “What Facebook Fed the Baby Boomers”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:

All 40 example sentences with feed

Synonyms of feed

Forms of feed

Verb
third-person singular presentfeeds
present participlefeeding
past participlefed
pastfed
Noun
pluralfeeds

Past tense of feed: fed

Plural of feed: feeds

Origin of feed

From Middle English feden, from Old English fēdan (“to feed”), from Proto-West Germanic *fōdijan, from Proto-Germanic *fōdijaną (“to feed”), from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂- (“to guard, graze, feed”). Cognate with West Frisian fiede (“to nourish, feed”), Dutch voeden (“to feed”), Danish føde (“to bring forth, feed”), Swedish föda (“to bring forth, feed”), Icelandic fæða (“to feed”), and more distantly with Latin pāscō (“feed, nourish”, verb) through Indo-European. More at food, fodder.

From Middle English fede, fed, from the verb (see above). Alternatively, perhaps from Old Norse fœða (“nourishment, food”), from Proto-Germanic *fōdijaną (“to feed”), whence also Old English fēdan (“to feed”).

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

Words formed from feed

Phrases with feed

44 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with feed

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about feed

What does feed mean?
Feed means to give (someone or something) food to eat.
What is feed in Hindi?
Feed in Hindi is खिलाना (khilānā), फ़ीड (fīḍ). See Feed meaning in Hindi.
How do you use feed in a sentence?
If we have time we might go on to Brighton, feed at the 'Ship,' and come back in the cool.
What part of speech is feed?
Feed can be a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce feed?
Feed is pronounced /fiːd/.
What is the past tense of feed?
The past tense of feed is fed.

Words near feed in the dictionary

  1. feeblish
  2. feebly
  3. feebs
  4. feechur
  5. feechurs
  6. feed
  7. feed a cold, starve a fever
  8. feed and water
  9. feed back
  10. feed bag
  11. feed bags

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: feed (page history and authors); feed (Odia, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-feed.ogg.

Cite this entry: “feed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/feed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.