ploughman's lunch

6.4

A cold meal of bread, cheese, and salad, sometimes with pickles or cold meat

noun
/ˈplaʊmənz lʌnʧ/

: almuerzo del labrador

For a simple meal, a ploughman's lunch with salad and pickles is always satisfying.

Examples

No incidents," Anne said as she spread butter on the bread of her ploughman's lunch.

Fiction book (1998)
At the picnic, we enjoyed a classic ploughman's lunch with fresh bread and cheese.
He packed a ploughman's lunch consisting of crusty bread, sharp cheddar, and a side of apple slices.

Synonyms

tiffin

vsploughman's lunch

1 9.1

A light midday meal people often eat in South Asia

is a British traditional midday meal with bread cheese and salad

Surface Forms

ploughman's lunch singular

ploughman's lunches plural

Morphology

ploughman's + lunch

The phrase is compositionally built from 'ploughman' + 'lunch', so a learner who knows the words will infer it denotes a meal associated with a ploughman (i.e. a simple or rustic midday meal). However, the exact conventional contents (bread, cheese, pickles, cold meat) are culturally specific and not fully predictable from the constituents, so the expression is only partially transparent to learners.

Etymology

Ploughman's lunch comes from the image of a ploughman, a farm worker, stopping work to eat a simple lunch of bread and cheese in the field. One popular story says pubs began to sell this easy meal, so today ploughman's lunch means 'a cold plate of bread, cheese and pickles'.