Word.ws English Dictionary

meat and potatoes

meat and potatoes adjective: normal, average, typical, unexceptional, or nondescript.

Adjective

meat and potatoes (comparative more meat and potatoes, superlative most meat and potatoes)

  1. (informal) Normal, average, typical, unexceptional, or nondescript.
    • Rick is very experimental and open-minded about trying new things, but Ted is a meat and potatoes kind of guy.

Noun

meat and potatoes (uncountable)

  1. (informal) The essential part or parts of something.
    • The complete attacking secrets of Harry Kane would be a slim volume. His game at its best is beautifully simple: high-energy, highly effective meat and potatoes. He just looks very tired.15 September 2018, Barney Ronay, “Finely tuned Liverpool are really getting into Jürgen Klopp’s groove”, in The Guardian
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see meat, and, potatoes.

Forms of meat and potatoes

comparativemore meat and potatoes
superlativemost meat and potatoes

Words formed from meat and potatoes

Questions about meat and potatoes

What does meat and potatoes mean?
Meat and potatoes means normal, average, typical, unexceptional, or nondescript.
What part of speech is meat and potatoes?
Meat and potatoes can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near meat and potatoes in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: meat and potatoes (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: “meat and potatoes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/meat_and_potatoes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.