Word.ws English Dictionary

staff of life

UK/ˈstɑːf ə(v)ˌlaɪf//ˈstæf ə(v)ˌlaɪf/

staff of life noun: bread or some other staple foodstuff.

staff of life: bread or some other staple foodstuff
Image: Klaus Höpfner, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

staff of life

  1. (idiomatic, literary, often, poetic) Bread or some other staple foodstuff.
    • It was reserved for Christians to torture bread, the staff of life, bread for which children in whole districts wail, bread, the gift of pasture to the poor, bread, for want of which thousands of our fellow beings annually perish by famine; it was reserved for Christians to torture the material of...1831 July 15, “Of the Blood”, in Western Journal of Health, volume 4, number 1, L. B. Lincoln, page 38
    • The round calabash is a perfect image for the feminine womb, within which the arduously pounded taro is contained and then offered as the very staff of life.1989, Rita Knipe, The Water of Life: A Jungian Journey Through Hawaiian Myth, University of Hawaii Press, →ISBN, page 38

Origin of staff of life

By extension from the Biblical phrase “break the staff of bread” (Hebrew מַטֶּה לֶחֶם (maté lékhem)), staff (“long, straight rod”) in this context meaning something that acts as a support: see, for example, Leviticus 26:26 (King James Version; spelling modernized): “And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight: and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied”; and Ezekiel 4:16: “[…] Son of man, behold, I will break the staff of bread in Jerusalem, and they shall eat bread by weight, and with care, and they shall drink water by measure, and with astonishment: […]”. Compare Egyptian ḫt n ꜥnḫ (“grain; food”, literally “stick or wood of life”).

Questions about staff of life

What does staff of life mean?
Staff of life means bread or some other staple foodstuff.
What part of speech is staff of life?
Staff of life is a noun.
How do you pronounce staff of life?
Staff of life is pronounced /ˈstɑːf ə(v)ˌlaɪf/ (UK).

Words near staff of life in the dictionary

  1. staff function
  2. staff functions
  3. staff nurse
  4. staff nurses
  5. staff of Asclepius
  6. staff of life
  7. staff officer
  8. staff officers
  9. staff out
  10. staff sergeant
  11. staff sergeant major

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: staff of life (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: En-us-staff of life.oga.

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