Word.ws English Dictionary

soul food

soul food noun: nourishment for the soul; spiritual sustenance.

Noun

soul food (countable and uncountable, plural soul foods)

  1. Nourishment for the soul; spiritual sustenance.
  2. (US) A style of food originating in the rural southern US, traditionally associated with African Americans.
    • I couldn't wait for eight o'clock to get home to eat out of those soul-food pots of Ella's, then get dressed in my zoot and head for some of my friends' places in town, to lindy-hop and get high, […]1965, Malcolm X, Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published 2015, →ISBN, page 70
    • Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets / Looking for soul food and a place to eat1972, Lou Reed, “Walk on the Wild Side”, in Transformer

Forms of soul food

pluralsoul foods
alternative formsoul-food

Origin of soul food

(food): Originated in the mid-1960s, when soul was commonly used to describe African-American culture.

Questions about soul food

What does soul food mean?
Soul food means nourishment for the soul; spiritual sustenance.
What part of speech is soul food?
Soul food is a noun.
What is the plural of soul food?
The plural of soul food is soul foods.

Words near soul food in the dictionary

  1. soul blues
  2. soul brother
  3. soul brothers
  4. soul cake
  5. soul cakes
  6. soul food
  7. soul foods
  8. soul fragment
  9. soul fragments
  10. soul house
  11. soul kiss

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: soul food (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-soul food.wav.

Cite this entry: “soul food.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/soul_food. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.