make a meal of
"make-a-meal-of" is a 11-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“make a meal of” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 14
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To spend more time and energy on some task than it warrants; to make something overly complicated; to make a big thing out of.
Corpus desk
Index EN-make-a-meal-of · make a meal of · English
make a meal of · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 14 letters
- VOW-6 6 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "M" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | make a meal of |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 14 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “make a meal of” in English
Rare enough to double-check
make a meal of is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for make a meal of, a sign its spelling follows regular English conventions. Our confusable-pair dataset has no match for it, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so any spelling logic here comes from how the word's sounds map to letters, not a documented origin story. The correct English form is make a meal of, spelled M-A-K-E- -A- -M-E-A-L- -O-F.
Definition
- 1To spend more time and energy on some task than it warrants; to make something overly complicated; to make a big thing out of.
- 2To eat something as a meal.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how make a meal of appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Some people can make a meal out of the simplest task. If you give it to a busy person, they don’t have time to muck around on the edges and worry about it — they’ll just do it.
They both looked good – I would have been happy with either version. There was no point in making a meal of the decision, so I just picked up the one which was nearest to me on the desk and said, ‘We’ll go with this one.’
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.