sweetmeat

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   a small sweet delicacy, such as a confection, candied fruit, or preserve

   The host offered rose-flavored sweetmeat after dinner.

Simplified etymology

Sweetmeat, recorded from the late Middle Ages, preserves an early sense of meat meaning “an item of food”; the earliest general sense of meat was simply “food.”

From sweet + meat in the older broad sense of "food." The compound originally meant any sweet food or delicacy, not animal flesh, and became especially associated with confectionery and preserved fruit.

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External links

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• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary