Meaning of eat in English

eat

verb

/iːt/ us

/iːt/

ate | eaten

eat verb (FOOD)

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A1 [ I or T ]

to put or take food into the mouth, chew it (= crush it with the teeth), and swallow it:

Do you eat meat?

When I've got a cold, I don't feel like eating.

We usually eat (= have a meal) at about seven o'clock.

Thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms, and examples

to eat food

eatWhat do you want to eat for lunch?
haveI'll just have one more piece of chocolate cake.
consumeHe consumes vast quantities of bread with every meal.
devourThe children devoured a whole packet of biscuits.
bolt (down)Don't bolt down your food - you'll make yourself ill!
gobble (up/down)The children gobbled their sweets.

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I don't eat meat and my husband doesn't either.
How many pieces of fresh fruit do you eat in a day?
Jane never eats breakfast.
I offered him a biscuit and he ate the whole plateful.
He paused for a moment to listen and then continued eating.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Eating

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eat verb (ACCEPT)

[ T ] US informal

to accept and pay for a cost or loss:

Supermarkets will likely eat gas price increases for as long as possible rather than pass costs on to customers.

If a singer's follow-up album flops, the record label eats the loss, which can run into millions of dollars.

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The Treasury Secretary insisted that retailers would "eat some of the tariffs."
You were imprudent, you messed up the contract, and you will have to eat the cost.
His bank ate the loss — more than $100,000.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Costs & expenses

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Idioms

eaten up with/by something
eat someone alive
eat someone for breakfast
eat your heart out
eat humble pie
eat like a bird
eat like a horse
eat someone's lunch
eat someone out of house and home
eat, sleep, and breathe something

More idioms

eat your words
have someone eating out of your hand
I'll eat my hat
(I'm so hungry), I could eat a horse
what's eating someone?

Phrasal verbs

eat away at something
eat away at someone
eat in
eat into something
eat out
eat (something) up
eat up something

(Definition of eat from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

eat | American Dictionary

eat

verb [ I/T ]

/it/

past tense ate us/eɪt/ | past participle eaten us/ˈi·tən/

eat verb [I/T] (HAVE FOOD)

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to put food into the mouth, chew it, and swallow it:

[ T ] He ate a hamburger for lunch.

[ I ] When I’ve got a cold, I don’t feel like eating.

[ I ] We usually eat (= have a meal) at about 7 p.m.

[ I ] Let’s eat in/out (= have a meal at home/at a restaurant) tonight.

eat verb [I/T] (DAMAGE)

to damage or destroy something:

[ I always + adv/prep ] Running water had gradually eaten into the rock, forming a channel.

Idioms

eat like a bird
eat like a horse
eat your words

Phrasal verbs

eat away at something

eat up something

(Definition of eat from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

Examples of eat

eat

In four instances, the testa was removed from one end of the seed and the fleshy cotyledons eaten from the centre.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Latent structure of eating disorder symptoms : a factor analytic and taxometric investigation.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

She reported eating all sorts of things she should not have.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The key is to have sufficient space for a table at which to eat.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Those populations sourced from lodgepole pine did not differ in fecundity according to which larval food had been eaten.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

In different countries, the same species can be prepared for eating in different ways which require different chemotypes.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

The second theme describes the women's rejection of the pressure surrounding body size and food and their desire to eat the foods they enjoyed.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

For example, the parser encodes the words eat and swallow as semantically equivalent.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

They might be eating, talking, whistling, humming, smoking during the most dramatic scenes.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Therefore, we hypothesized that those children affected would have a preference for the foods they actually ate in a visual ' line-up ' of all the items.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

And when he ate he threw it up.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

It ate about 1 sq. cm. of leaf surface.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

For example, whenever they were hungry they ate together.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

Meals were eaten in the living room, rather than in the kitchen and all the family ate together at the same table.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

This species fed slowly and ate few fruits per feeding visit.

From the Cambridge English Corpus

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These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

What is the pronunciation of eat?

What is the pronunciation of eaten?

Translations of eat

in Chinese (Traditional)

吃…

Meaning of eat in English

eat verb (FOOD)

eat verb (ACCEPT)

Idioms

Phrasal verbs

eat | American Dictionary

eat verb [I/T] (HAVE FOOD)

eat verb [I/T] (DAMAGE)

Idioms

Phrasal verbs

Examples of eat

Translations of eat

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