meat [OE] Meat is related to mete [OE], an old word meaning ‘to measure’, and mate [LME] through the idea of a mate being someone you share food with. It goes back to an ancient root shared with meditate [M16th]. The earliest sense of meat was simply ‘food’. This survives in the proverb one man’s meat is another man’s poison, which is recorded in English from the late 16th century but has a parallel in the work of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius of the 1st century bc. Other early meanings include ‘an item of food’, now found only in sweetmeat [LME]. See also flesh.