Pylimitics

If you’re a vegetarian or vegan in 2025, you don’t eat meat. But if you’re a vegetarian or vegan with a time machine who zips back to England about a thousand years ago or more, you’d find yourself eating meat all the time. This isn’t because of a previously undocumented side effect of time machines (especially those off-brand ones from Shenzhen) — although there are any number of those, so be careful. It’s because back then, “meat” didn’t mean the flesh of animals. It just meant “food.” 

A monk named Bede wrote a book called Ecclesiastical History, which includes this bit when translated into Old English (Bede, like any self-respecting monk in the 7th century, wrote in Latin):

“he in his hus eode ך mete þigde”
(he went into his house and accepted meat).

There’s not a great deal of context there, but there are enough contemporary mentions of the word “meat” to make it clear they just meant “something to eat,” whatever it was. By the way, you might have heard of Bede, who was also known as “the Venerable Bede.” In the movie The Name of the Rose, Sean Connery mentions him at one point. But back to the meat and potatoes of this post. 

By about the middle of the 1200s Middle English had mostly supplanted Old English, and the meaning of “meat” was beginning to narrow. In a poem from the period called The Story of Genesis and Exodus, lines 3150 to 3153 (poems tended to drag on and on back in those days) read:
“Ilc man after his owen fond,

Heued and fet, and in rew mete,
Lesen fro ðe bones and eten, 
Wið wriðel and vn-lif bread.”

(Each man after his own desire, [roast] the meat in bitter herbs, head and feet, pick from the bones and eat, with herbs and unleavened bread.)

The meaning of “meat” continued to get narrower in some ways, which has resulted in some regional variations. In the southern US, “meat” sometimes means specifically pork. And according to the Dictionary of American Regional English, up until the 1960s or 70s in Hawaii, “meat” meant specifically beef and not pork. 

The original Old English meaning of “meat” still shows up here and there. The edible portion of a nut is called “meat” even though it has nothing to do with animals. The word is also still occasionally used to mean food in general — although this might be because of Shakespeare, who used it that way, and you can find quotations from Shakespeare all over the place in contemporary English.

The only other interesting thing about the word “meat” is that in Old English it was also a verb. If you provided someone with food, you were “meating” them. And according, once again, to the Dictionary of American Regional English, there are some Appalachian dialects where it’s still used that way.