Feeding: One Word for Babies, Animals and Parking Meters
Feeding is giving food to someone or something that cannot get it alone. English stretches the word to machines, fires and meters.
Feeding is supplying food, and the word carries a quiet assumption: the one being fed cannot do it alone. That is why you feed a baby but eat dinner yourself, and why English happily feeds a fire, a machine or a parking meter — all of them consume without hands.
- Giving food to someone or an animal. *Feeding time at the zoo.*
- Supplying material to a machine. *Feeding paper into the printer.*
- Feeding frenzy — a rush of competing activity. *A media feeding frenzy.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Verb | feed | Feed the cat. |
| Past | fed | Already fed. |
| -ing | feeding | Night feeding. |
| Noun | feed | Animal feed. |
| Adjective | well-fed | A well-fed dog. |
How it is used in a sentence
- Night feeding is the hardest part of the first month.Common in writing about babies.
- Do not feed the animals.The most-printed sentence in zoos.
- The story set off a feeding frenzy among reporters.From the behaviour of sharks around bait.
Things English feeds
- Feed a fire — add fuel
- Feed a meter — put coins in
- Feed a habit — keep supplying it
- Feed a line — supply words to someone
- Feed back — return information to the source, which gave us *feedback*
From Old English *fedan*, to nourish, related to *food*. The industrial senses arrived with machinery in the nineteenth century, and the computing sense of a feed followed the same logic: a supply arriving continuously.
Fed or feeded?
Fed. The verb is irregular: feed, fed, fed.
Where does *feedback* come from?
From engineering, where part of an output is fed back into the input. The sense of comments on someone's work is a later borrowing.