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food stamp

food stamp

153 2.5
A government card or paper that people with little money use to buy food at certain stores
  • noun
  • /fuːd stæmp/
  • Archaic
translation icon : vales de comida (EE. UU.)
  • Many low-income families rely on food stamps to buy groceries each month.
  • food stamp program
  • food stamp benefits
  • receive food stamps

Then I went for food stamps because I had no fucking money.

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Examples

  • When people hear that, most of us think about poor people lined up for food stamps and rent subsidies.

  • So when we first moved down here, I know we signed up for food stamps.

  • We had food stamps and other government benefits.

  • And then one day my Mama gave me food stamps and was like, go to the store with that, right?

  • We lived on, you know, food stamps and, and hand me down clothes and whatever we we got by.

  • We grew up on food stamps.

  • Two days later, the day our son Jack turned six, our first food stamps arrived in the mail.

    Fiction book (1995)
  • He'd been living at a senior citizens' home and getting by on Social Security and food stamps.

    Academic text (2011)
  • I grew up on on on WIC and food stamps, government assistance.

  • Far too many Walmart workers qualify for food stamps, which we the people pay for.

    Blog text (4)

Surface Forms

food stamp singular
food stamps plural

Morphology

food + stamp

The element 'food' clearly signals the domain (things to eat), but the constituent 'stamp' in its literal sense (a mark or postage stamp) does not directly indicate a voucher. The compound is therefore partially compositional — learners can guess it relates to food but need cultural or lexical knowledge that 'stamp' here means a government-issued coupon for buying food, making it only semi-transparent to a B1 learner.

Etymology

Food stamp comes from real paper coupons the government once gave to people with little money to buy food, and each coupon looked like a stamp. So today food stamp means 'a government voucher or card to help people buy food'.