Meaning: eat

Illustrative Context

Eat some food and drink some water.

Target Sense

• The most generic verb for eating, prototypically of people eating a basic, traditional foodstuff. The lexeme selected must be able to be used in that context, although will normally have much wider applicability too, to animals eating, and to most or all other foods.
• The default register term: avoid polite or euphemistic words (e.g. English dine, German speisen, Russian кушать), slang (e.g. French bouffer), nursery words (e.g. munch), etc..
• The general sense of taking food into the body, without focusing on any particular way of eating or muscular action in the mouth, i.e. avoid specific terms like chew, nibble, swallow, etc.. (Note that language change can alter the specificity of such words. The Latin word manducare originally meant ‘chew’, and thus is not the IE-CoR lexeme for ‘eat’ in Classical Latin. Nonetheless, that word root has since given rise to Italian mangiare and French manger. These no longer bear any of the original connotation of specifically ‘chew’, and have become the default, unmarked lexemes for the IE-CoR meaning ‘eat’ in these languages.)
• Avoid intensifying verbs, e.g. eat up, devour.
• If a language has different default words used with different types of food (e.g. meat, cereals, fruits/nuts, hard food, soft food, liquid food, etc.), then select the most generic word. If no term can be identified as more generic than others, select the verb used for eating the most basic, traditional foodstuff for most speakers of that language: e.g. rice, bread, maize, etc., as appropriate. This should therefore also be the most statistically frequent ‘eat’ verb in that language.
• The literal sense of eating, i.e. avoid figurative senses of things being eaten away (at), gradually losing mass or emotionally undermined by.