meed
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of meed
before 900; Middle English mede, Old English mēd; cognate with German Miete hire; akin to Old English meord, Gothic mizdō, Greek misthós reward
Explanation
A meed is a well-deserved compensation or reward. At a birthday party, every guest hopes to gather his or her meed of candy from the piñata they've worked so hard to smash open. The noun meed is a very old fashioned way to talk about a payment or share of something. You're most likely to come across it in older books, but you might want to use it to describe the way your grandmother manages to give each of her twelve grandchildren a meed of her attention and love. Meed comes from the Old English root mēd, which has a Proto-Indo-European root in common with the Greek misthos, or "reward."
Vocabulary lists containing meed
Frankenstein
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Jane Eyre
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As You Like It
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
