If you have ever read an old recipe book or stumbled upon a vintage candy shop, you might have paused at the term “sweetmeats.” It sounds contradictory to modern ears. To us, “meat” implies the flesh of an animal—beef, pork, or chicken. Why, then, would candied fruit or sugary confections be labeled as meat? Are they savory? Is there hidden bacon in the bonbon?

The answer lies not in the kitchen, but in the fascinating evolution of language. “Sweetmeat” is a linguistic fossil—a preserved remnant of a time when the word “meat” meant something entirely different.

This phenomenon is known in linguistics as Semantic Narrowing (or specialization). It is the process by which a word’s meaning becomes less general and more specific over time. Like a camera lens zooming in on a single detail of a landscape, language often restricts the scope of words, leaving us with a lexicon that is vastly different from that of our ancestors.

Let’s take a journey through history to understand how “food” became “flesh”, how “dying” became “starving”, and how the English language shrinks its definitions over centuries.

The Meat of the Matter

To understand the “sweetmeat”, we have to go back to Old English. The word mete (pronounced similarly to the modern word) simply meant “food” or “sustenance.” It referred to anything solid that you could eat, as distinguished from drinc (drink).

For roughly a thousand years, English speakers used generic phrases like “meat and drink” to encompass their entire diet. You can see this definition preserved in the King James Bible (1611). In Genesis 1:29, God says: “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed… to you it shall be for meat.” Obviously, herbs are not animal flesh; the text is simply saying the plants shall be for food.

So, what did they call animal muscle back then? The word was flesh (or Old English flæsc). If you sat down to dinner in the year 900 AD, you would eat “flesh” as your main course of “meat” (food).

Over the centuries, semantic narrowing took hold. The word “flesh” began to take on connotation distinct from cuisine, often associated with the living body or theological concepts (sins of the flesh). As “flesh” became less appetizing as a culinary term, “meat” began to zoom in. It shifted from “solid food” to “animal food.” Today, the narrowing is complete. If you ask a vegetarian if they eat meat, and they say “no”, they aren’t claiming to survive on air and water; they are using the narrowed definition.

However, the ghost of the old meaning haunts us in compound words. “Sweetmeat” (candied food) and “nutmeat” (the edible part inside the shell) remain as evidence of the word’s broader history.

Starving for Meaning

While “meat” narrowed its scope regarding what we eat, the word “starve” narrowed its scope regarding how we die.

The Old English verb steorfan meant “to die.” It didn’t matter how you died; if you were killed in battle, succumbed to illness, or froze in the winter, you steorfan. This root is still very much alive in English’s sibling language, German, where the word sterben simply means “to die.”

In the Middle Ages, English speakers began to require more specificity. A specific type of dying—death caused by a lack of food or cold—became associated with the word. For a long time, you could “starve of cold.” In fact, in some rural British dialects, it is still common to hear someone complain of being “starved” when they are freezing, not hungry.

Eventually, the lens zoomed in even further. The association with freezing faded away in standard English, and “starve” came to mean exclusively “to suffer or die from lack of food.” The meaning shrank from the ultimate fate of all living things to a specific biological deprivation.

The Animal Kingdom Shrinks: Deer, Hounds, and Fowl

Semantic narrowing is particularly aggressive when it comes to the animal kingdom. As humans classified nature with more precision, generic terms were relegated to specific species.

1. Deer

If you learned German, you might know that the word for “animal” is Tier. In Old English, the cognate was deor. It referred to any wild animal. If you saw a lion, a wolf, or a rabbit in the forest, they were all deor.

Shakespeare hints at this broader meaning in King Lear, writing of “Mice and rats, and such small deer.” He wasn’t describing tiny, antlered mammals; he was describing animals generally. Over time, hunting culture narrowed the term. Because the antlered ruminant was the most prestigious animal to hunt, the word deor attached itself permanently to the family Cervidae.

2. Hound

Similarly, the Old English hund meant simply “dog.” Any canine, from a lapdog to a guard dog, was a hound. (Again, compare this to the modern German Hund, which still just means “dog”).

In English, however, we adopted the word “dog” (a word of mysterious origin with no clear cousins in other languages) to replace the general term. “Hound” was subsequently demoted and narrowed to refer only to specific breeds used for hunting (bloodhounds, beagles, greyhounds).

3. Fowl

The word fugel (fowl) originally meant “bird.” Any bird. From eagles to sparrows. You can still see this in the biblical “fowls of the air.” Today, “fowl” has narrowed significantly to refer almost exclusively to barnyard birds raised for food, such as chickens, ducks, and turkeys, or to wild game birds.

The Great Grain Confusion: What is ‘Corn’?

If you cross the Atlantic, semantic narrowing can cause genuine confusion. The word “corn” is an excellent example of geographical narrowing.

Originally, “corn” meant a grain or a seed. It was virtually synonymous with “grain.” However, in practice, people tended to use the word “corn” to refer to the dominant crop of a specific region.

• In England, “corn” traditionally referred to wheat.
• In Scotland and Ireland, “corn” often referred to oats.
• In North America, when settlers encountered the native maize crop, they called it “Indian Corn.”

Over time, Americans dropped the “Indian” and simply called maize “corn.” The meaning narrowed so heavily in the U.S. that Americans often forget “corn” is a generic term elsewhere. This is why British “Corn Laws” of the 19th century were about wheat prices, not about corn on the cob.

Why Does Language Narrow?

Why do we do this? Why rob words of their broad utility?

1. The influx of loanwords: After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French rushed into the English language. English often had a broad word (like fugel for bird), and French introduced specific terms. The languages competed. Often, the native English word would retreat into a specialized niche while the loanword or a new term took over the general category.

2. Cultural significance: As seen with “deer” and “corn”, if one specific type of a category becomes overwhelmingly important to a culture (as a food source or hunting prize), the name of the category often collapses onto that single important item.

3. The Euphemism Treadmill: As mentioned with “meat”, we sometimes narrow words to avoid discomfort. Saying we are eating “flesh” sounds barbaric to modern ears; saying we are eating “meat” (food) creates a polite psychological distance.

Conclusion: The Shrinking Vocabulary?

It might seem like semantic narrowing limits our language, but the opposite is true. While individual words shrink in scope, the language as a whole gains precision. By turning “meat” from “food” into “animal flesh”, and adopting new words for the general category, we gained the ability to be more specific without using extra adjectives.

Language is always in motion. Words we use broadly today may be narrowed by our great-grandchildren. Perhaps “computer” will one day refer only to a specific archaic desktop machine, or “car” will refer strictly to gasoline-powered vehicles.

So, the next time you see a “sweetmeat”, don’t think of it as a mistake. Think of it as a time capsule—a little linguistic memory of a time when all food was meat, and all animals were deer.