Word.ws English Dictionary

TV dinner

TV dinner noun: a prepackaged meal purchased chilled or frozen and heated at home.

tv dinner: a prepackaged meal purchased chilled or frozen and heated at home
Image: Campbell Soup Company, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

TV dinner (plural TV dinners)

  1. A prepackaged meal purchased chilled or frozen and heated at home.
    • Like foil-tray frozen meals, which were used by airlines before Swanson branded them as “TV dinners,” Twitter was not initially invented to be an adjunct to the tube.2023 July 10, James Poniewozik, “The Twitter Watch Party Is Over”, in The New York Times

Synonyms of TV dinner

Forms of TV dinner

pluralTV dinners

Origin of TV dinner

Originally used for a brand of packaged meal (TV Brand Frozen Dinner) developed in 1953 for Swanson & Sons.

Questions about TV dinner

What does TV dinner mean?
TV dinner means a prepackaged meal purchased chilled or frozen and heated at home.
What part of speech is TV dinner?
TV dinner is a noun.
What is the plural of TV dinner?
The plural of TV dinner is TV dinners.

Words near TV dinner in the dictionary

  1. tuzzy-muzzy
  2. tv
  3. TV black
  4. TV channel
  5. TV channels
  6. TV dinner
  7. TV dinners
  8. TV game
  9. TV games
  10. TV guide
  11. TV guides

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: TV dinner (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-TV dinner.wav.

Cite this entry: “TV dinner.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tv_dinner. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.