A meal is an occasion of eating food, such as breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It can also refer to the food eaten at that time.
From Old English “mǣl” meaning 'time, occasion, meal-time', originally more about a 'time' than the food itself. It gradually shifted to mean the food eaten at that regular time. A different word “meal” meaning 'ground grain' comes from another Old English root and is unrelated.
English hides two different 'meals': one is your dinner, the other is the floury stuff made from grain. They look the same now, but they’re unrelated—one began as 'time', the other as 'ground material'.
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