breakfast

From Middle English brekefast, brekefaste, equivalent to break +‎ fast (literally, "to end the nightly fast"), likely a variant of Old English fæstenbryċe, (literally, "fast-breach"). Cognate with Dutch breekvasten (“breakfast”).

• IPA^(key): /ˈbɹɛkfəst/

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• (meal eaten after religious fasting, also): (US) IPA^(key): /ˈbɹeɪkˌfæst/, (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈbreɪkˌfɑːst/

breakfast (countable and uncountable, plural breakfasts)

1. The first meal of the day, usually eaten in the morning.

   You should put more protein in her breakfast so she will grow.

   • 1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Second Part of Henry the Sixt, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iv], page 125, column 2:

     A ſorry Breakfaſt for my Lord Protector.

   • 1921, Ben Travers, A Cuckoo in the Nest, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1925, →OCLC:

     Peter, after the manner of man at the breakfast table, had allowed half his kedgeree to get cold and was sniggering over a letter. Sophia looked at him sharply. The only letter she had received was from her mother. Sophia’s mother was not a humourist.

2. (by extension) A meal consisting of food normally eaten in the morning, which may typically include eggs, sausages, toast, bacon, etc.

   We serve breakfast all day.

3. The celebratory meal served after a wedding (and occasionally after other solemnities e.g. a funeral).
4. (largely obsolete outside religion) A meal eaten after a period of (now often religious) fasting.
   • c. 1693?, John Dryden, Amaryllis

     The wolves will get a breakfast by my death.

• In the sense "meal eaten after a period of (now often religious) fasting", the word is more often spelled break-fast or break fast; it is also often pronounced differently.

• brunch
• jentacular

breakfast (third-person singular simple present breakfasts, present participle breakfasting, simple past and past participle breakfasted)

1. (intransitive) To eat the morning meal.
   • May 14, 1689, Matthew Prior, epistle to Fleetwood Shephard Esq.

     First, sir, I read, and then I breakfast.

   • 1847 October 16, Currer Bell [pseudonym; Charlotte Brontë], chapter I, in Jane Eyre. An Autobiography. […], volume II, London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, page 12:

     “Oh, he set off the moment he had breakfasted! […]”

   • 1941 August, C. Hamilton Ellis, “The English Station”, in Railway Magazine, page 356:

     Fifty years ago, the traveller might breakfast well at home in London, and take nothing more than a cup of coffee at King's Cross.

2. (transitive) To serve breakfast to.
   • 1987, Anne McCaffrey, The Lady: A Tale of Ireland, page 269:

     By seven-thirty she had breakfasted them, provided each with a packed lunch and Thermoses of coffee and tea

• break one's fast

• fast break, fastbreak