Meat: It’s what was for dinner.





Until around the 13th century, meat and its predecessors simply referred to ‘food,’ be it flora or fauna, including food for animals. In English, it traces back to the O.E. maet . The words mast (as in nuts and pig feed) and must share similar OE roots, maest and must, which respectively meant the juice expressed from grapes before the fermentation of wine.





There are a couple of different PIE roots referred to in the literature, but I’ve yet to find a coherent enough etymology of meat past Old English to merit posting here.



