Word.ws English Dictionary

room meat

room meat noun: person(s) present in a passive way or to make up the numbers; bystander(s).

Noun

room meat (uncountable)

  1. (informal) Person(s) present in a passive way or to make up the numbers; bystander(s).
    • There is a scene in the film In The Loop where an MP is asked to attend an important meeting. But as he enters the room he is warned, with some menace, to keep his mouth shut tight. "What?", he asks, "You've got me here as room meat?"
    • How much of our lives as academics is spent as room meat: turning up to things because it would look bad if the numbers were small, or just because we are meant to be there?2012 April 23, Jonathan Wolff, “Lecturers, are you talking to 'room meat'?”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name)

Forms of room meat

alternative formmeat in the room

Origin of room meat

from the sense of "meat" that refers negatively to people as in meat puppet

Questions about room meat

What does room meat mean?
Room meat means person(s) present in a passive way or to make up the numbers; bystander(s).
What part of speech is room meat?
Room meat is a noun.

Words near room meat in the dictionary

  1. room dividers
  2. room for a pony
  3. room for doubt
  4. room for maneuver
  5. room in
  6. room meat
  7. room of doom
  8. room parties
  9. room party
  10. room service
  11. room set

Source and license

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