Word.ws English Dictionary

meat and drink

meat and drink noun: that on which somebody survives, or which makes their existence meaningful; means of subsistence.

Noun

meat and drink (uncountable)

  1. That on which somebody survives, or which makes their existence meaningful; means of subsistence.
    • The work he had done in instructing the woman; the work he had to do among the Samaritans; the prospect he now had of doing good to many, this was meat and drink to him; it was the greatest pleasure and satisfaction imaginable.1811, An Exposition of the Old and New Testament
    • This sort of thing is meat and drink to the born Controller—and Controllers are born with the right imperturbable temperament for the job; hence the fact that they are recruited from many different grades of operating staff, and some recruits don't stay the course.1962 August, G. Freeman Allen, “Traffic control on the Great Northern Line”, in Modern Railways, page 132

Origin of meat and drink

From meat in the archaic sense of food.

Questions about meat and drink

What does meat and drink mean?
Meat and drink means that on which somebody survives, or which makes their existence meaningful; means of subsistence.
What part of speech is meat and drink?
Meat and drink is a noun.

Words near meat and drink in the dictionary

  1. measuring worm
  2. measuring worms
  3. measuringly
  4. measurings
  5. meat
  6. meat and drink
  7. meat and potatoes
  8. meat and three
  9. meat and threes
  10. meat and two veg
  11. meat ant

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: meat and drink (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.

Last updated:

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