Word.ws English Dictionary

horsebread

horsebread noun: a cheap bread made from seasonal legumes, bran, and other non-wheat cereal grains such as oats and rye, produced and consumed in medieval Europe, and often used to feed horses.

Noun

horsebread (uncountable)

  1. (historical) A cheap bread made from seasonal legumes, bran, and other non-wheat cereal grains such as oats and rye, produced and consumed in medieval Europe, and often used to feed horses.
    • Horsebread was, literally, the very cheapest sort of bread intended to feed horses. It isn't the city bakers who are guilty of making underweight loaves or overcharging for them; it's the women baxters. I suspect the men didn't demean themselves by baking horsebread, rather than that they were too...2016, Toni Mount, A Year in the Life of Medieval England, Amberley Publishing, →ISBN

Origin of horsebread

From horse + bread.

Questions about horsebread

What does horsebread mean?
Horsebread means a cheap bread made from seasonal legumes, bran, and other non-wheat cereal grains such as oats and rye, produced and consumed in medieval Europe, and often used to feed horses.
What part of speech is horsebread?
Horsebread is a noun.

Words near horsebread in the dictionary

  1. horsebound
  2. horsebox
  3. horseboxes
  4. horseboy
  5. horseboys
  6. horsebread
  7. horsebreaker
  8. horsebreakers
  9. horsebreaking
  10. horsebreakings
  11. horsebreeder

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: horsebread (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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