| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
| |
| bread |
| |
| PRONUNCIATION: |  br d |
| NOUN: | 1. A staple food made from flour or meal mixed with other dry and liquid ingredients, usually combined with a leavening agent, and kneaded, shaped into loaves, and baked. 2a. Food in general, regarded as necessary for sustaining life: “If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is a close second” (Edward Bellamy). b. Something that nourishes; sustenance: “My bread shall be the anguish of my mind” (Edmund Spenser). 3a. Means of support; livelihood: earn one's bread. b. Slang Money. | | TRANSITIVE VERB: | Inflected forms: bread·ed, bread·ing, breads
To coat with bread crumbs, as before cooking: breaded the fish fillets. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Middle English, from Old English br ad. See bhreu- in Appendix I. N., sense 3b, possibly from Cockney rhyming slang bread and honey.
| | |
| |
| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
|
|
