meat

meat

W3S2 [mi:t] n

[: Old English; Origin: mete 'food']

1.) [U and C]

the flesh of animals and birds eaten as food

▪ I gave up eating meat a few months ago.

▪ raw meat

▪ a meat pie

▪ a selection of cold meats

red meat

(=a dark-coloured meat such as ↑beef)

white meat

(=meat that is pale in colour, for example ↑chicken)

2.) [U]

something interesting or important in a talk, book, film etc

▪ There's no meat to their arguments.

▪ We then got down to the real meat of the debate (=the main and most interesting part of it) .

3.) sb doesn't have much meat on him/her

BrE need some (more) meat on your bones

AmE informal used to say that someone looks very thin

4.) one man's meat is another man's poison

used to say that something that one person likes may not be liked by someone else

5.) be easy meat

BrE informal if someone is easy meat, they are easy to defeat, deceive, or hurt

be easy meat for

▪ San Marino should be easy meat for England in next week's match.

6.) the meat and potatoes

AmE informal the most important or basic parts of a discussion, decision, piece of work etc

▪ Let's get down to the meat and potatoes. How much are you going to pay me for this?

7.) be meat and drink to sb

BrE to be something that someone enjoys doing or finds very easy to do because they have done it many times before

▪ The first five questions in the quiz were about football, which was meat and drink to Brian.