make a meal of
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
To make something more difficult or complicated than necessary
Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt
Làm cho việc gì đó trở nên khó khăn hoặc phức tạp hơn cần thiết
Machine-translated — suggest a fix
Literally: to eat a meal
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
Harold was becoming more and more irritable with his wife's bouncing in and out of bed and he declared that if the mice saw the kitten they might well decide to make a meal of it.
He wasn't sure whether to speak in the accent he'd used in Look Back in Anger (‘ a splendid Blimp ' — Worcester Gazette) or the one for When We are Married (‘ made a meal of the part ' — Croydon Advertiser).
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-31; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “make a meal of” mean?
To make something more difficult or complicated than necessary Literally: to eat a meal
Is “make a meal of” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.