Word.ws English Dictionary

meat market

meat market noun: a market where meat is sold.

meat market: a market where meat is sold
Image: Russell Lee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

meat market (plural meat markets)

  1. A market where meat is sold.
  2. (colloquial, idiomatic) A place where one goes to find a date or a casual sexual encounter, such as a bar (establishment) or nightclub.
    • The rumors about Carnival 7NC’s are legion, one such rumor being that their Cruises are kind of like floating meat-market bars and that their ships bob with a conspicuous carnal squeakatasqueakata at night.1997, David Foster Wallace, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again”, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Kindle edition, Little, Brown Book Group
    Synonyms:
    meet market
  3. (colloquial) A place or situation abounding in men, especially beefcake.

Synonyms of meat market

Forms of meat market

pluralmeat markets

Origin of meat market

The colloquial sense was coined in the 1950s. Sex has been likened to meat since as early as the 16th century, with such references to it as "have a jumble in the giblets" and "have a bit of mutton", not to mention "carnal relations".

Questions about meat market

What does meat market mean?
Meat market means a market where meat is sold.
What part of speech is meat market?
Meat market is a noun.
What is the plural of meat market?
The plural of meat market is meat markets.

Words near meat market in the dictionary

  1. meat jun
  2. meat keeper
  3. meat keepers
  4. meat loaf
  5. meat lovers'
  6. meat market
  7. meat markets
  8. meat off
  9. meat offering
  10. meat offerings
  11. meat on one's bones

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: meat market (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-meat market.ogg.

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