meat
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "meat", 4-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "meat" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "meat" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
meat is aEnglishnoun. It means: The flesh (muscle tissue) of an animal used as food, or a food designed to replicate its taste and texture (like plant-based meat). Pronounced /miːt/. It ranks #2,355 in English word frequency. Often confused with MT and men.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | meat |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /miːt/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #2,355 |
| Misspellings tracked | 5 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for meat is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /miːt/. Corpus data places it at rank #2,355 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 12 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 5 documented wrong-spelling variants for meat, with forms such as "emat", "maet", and "meatt". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "MT", "men", "met", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English mete, from Old English mete (“food”), from Proto-West Germanic *mati, from Proto-Germanic *matiz (“food”), from Proto-Indo-European *meh₂d- (“to drip, ooze; grease, fat”). Cognates Cognate with North Frisian Miit (“meat”), Danish mad (“f… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is meat, spelled M-E-A-T, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1The flesh (muscle tissue) of an animal used as food, or a food designed to replicate its taste and texture (like plant-based meat).
- 2A type of meat, by anatomic position and provenance.
- 3Food, for animals or humans, especially solid food.
- 4A type of food, a dish.
- 5A meal.
- 6Meal; flour.
- 7Any relatively thick, solid part of a fruit, nut etc.
- 8A penis.
- 9The best or most substantial part of something.
- 10The sweet spot of a bat or club (in cricket, golf, baseball etc.).
- 11A meathead.
- 12A totem, or (by metonymy) a clan or clansman which uses it.
Etymology
From Middle English mete, from Old English mete (“food”), from Proto-West Germanic *mati, from Proto-Germanic *matiz (“food”), from Proto-Indo-European *meh₂d- (“to drip, ooze; grease, fat”). Cognates Cognate with North Frisian Miit (“meat”), Danish mad (“food”), Faroese and Icelandic matur (“food, meal”), Norn mader (“food”), Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish mat (“food”), Gothic 𐌼𐌰𐍄𐍃 (mats, “food”). A -ja- derivation from the same base is found in Middle Dutch and Middle Low German met (“lean pork”), from which Dutch met (“minced pork”) and German Mett (“minced meat”) derive, respectively. Compare also Old Irish mess (“animal feed”) and Welsh mes (“acorns”), English mast (“fodder for swine and other animals”), which are probably from the same root.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: emat,maet,meatt,meta,mmeat
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for meat
Misspelling Variants of "meat"
Frequency rank: #2,355 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter M in our English index: