Posted by Marc Bailes
On Thanksgiving we reacquaint with friends and family, get a day off work, and maybe even watch some football. But Thanksgiving will also likely be one of your biggest meals of the year. In this context, it’s apparent that a meal is a portion of food or the collective act of eating that portion with others. But meal is even more interesting that. In Old English the word had two completely different meanings-- neither of which was our current one. In one usage, meal was the part of the grain that we can eat, preserved in oatmeal and cornmeal. Because it described something very fine, meal was powdery food that looks like flour. Meal was also used in the garden, for a powdery substance on some flowers. This meal even lived as a verb, meaning to grind something very finely.
Interestingly, it’s also the source of our adjective mealy, for someone pale or even mealy-mouthed. Because the root of this meal was grinding, you can see how mill was a relative. Separately, a meal was a measurement. Specifically, it was a fixed amount of time, alternatively spelled mele. In this sense, meal is related to meter. This meal measurement was soon applied in a more specific way, for the amount time spent eating. From there it became the food that one was eating, making the transformation complete. Today, using meal as a measurement exists only in combined forms, like the word piecemeal, which means to do something piece by meal.
Posted by Katie Macpherson
Posted by Alexis Tirado
Posted by Mario Bosquez
