"soul food" meaning in English

See soul food in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: soul foods [plural]
Etymology: (food): Originated in the mid-1960s, when soul was commonly used to describe African-American culture. Etymology templates: {{sense|food}} (food): Head templates: {{en-noun|~}} soul food (countable and uncountable, plural soul foods)
  1. Nourishment for the soul; spiritual sustenance. Tags: countable, uncountable Synonyms: soul-food
    Sense id: en-soul_food-en-noun-1PdQ5NjG
  2. (US) A style of food originating in the rural southern US, traditionally associated with African Americans. Tags: US, countable, uncountable Categories (topical): Foods
    Sense id: en-soul_food-en-noun-2ehpV1Xm Disambiguation of Foods: 33 67 Categories (other): American English, English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 20 80 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 19 81 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 20 80

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for soul food meaning in English (2.9kB)

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  "etymology_text": "(food): Originated in the mid-1960s, when soul was commonly used to describe African-American culture.",
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      "examples": [
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          "text": "Coordinate term: food for thought"
        }
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        "Nourishment for the soul; spiritual sustenance."
      ],
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          "_dis1": "63 37",
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          "kind": "other",
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1965, Malcolm X, Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, published 2015, page 70",
          "text": "I couldn't wait for eight o'clock to get home to eat out of those soul-food pots of Ella's, then get dressed in my zoot and head for some of my friends' places in town, to lindy-hop and get high, […]",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1972, Lou Reed (lyrics and music), “Walk on the Wild Side”, in Transformer",
          "text": "Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets / Looking for soul food and a place to eat",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2023 July 6, Maria C. Hunt, “Could an ancient, climate-friendly crop be the future of beer?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN",
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          "type": "quotation"
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  "lang_code": "en",
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  "senses": [
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      "examples": [
        {
          "text": "Coordinate term: food for thought"
        }
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        "Nourishment for the soul; spiritual sustenance."
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          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1972, Lou Reed (lyrics and music), “Walk on the Wild Side”, in Transformer",
          "text": "Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets / Looking for soul food and a place to eat",
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        },
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          "ref": "2023 July 6, Maria C. Hunt, “Could an ancient, climate-friendly crop be the future of beer?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN",
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          "type": "quotation"
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  "synonyms": [
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.