Word.ws English Dictionary

food for powder

food for powder is the dated form of cannon fodder.

Meaning of cannon fodder

Noun

cannon fodder (uncountable)

  1. Military forces considered to be expendable.
    • "A foolish old half-pay officer," boomed Sir Hilton. "Go back to your club, sir, and play bridge with other superannuated cannon-fodder, sir."1930, Frank Richards, The Magnet: Victory for the Rebels
  2. (broadly) Any group of contestants that have no hope of success.
    • It is arrogant to simply dismiss San Marino and say they should not be playing qualifiers at this level but it is hard to see what England and manager Southgate learned from this one-sided, rather soulless experience against a team who were little more than cannon fodder.2021 March 25, Phil McNulty, “England 5-0 San Marino”, in BBC Sport
  3. (rare) Artillery ammunition.
  4. (slang) An expendable minor character primarily included to make the protagonist(s) stand out.

Questions about food for powder

What is food for powder the dated form of?
Food for powder is the dated form of cannon fodder.

Words near food for powder in the dictionary

  1. food falls
  2. food fight
  3. food fights
  4. food fish
  5. food fishes
  6. food for powder
  7. food for the gods
  8. food for the worms
  9. food for thought
  10. food for worms
  11. food fraud

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: food for powder (page history and authors); cannon fodder (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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Cite this entry: “food for powder.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/food_for_powder. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.