Welsh rabbit

1 6.7

Melted cheese served hot on toast, often with beer or mustard

noun
/wɛlʃ ˈræbɪt/

: queso galés

On a chilly evening, a warm Welsh rabbit served on crispy toast is the perfect comfort food.

Examples

I'll make a Welsh rabbit and we'll celebrate.

Man-Made Monster (1941)
Welsh rabbit.

Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation (1992)
For dinner, I prepared a delicious Welsh rabbit topped with a sprinkle of paprika.
She invited her friends over to enjoy Welsh rabbit with cold beers for a cozy night in.

Synonyms

rarebit

vsWelsh rabbit

1 9.5

A hot dish of melted cheese served on toasted bread often made with beer

has the same sense but is the shorter traditional name

Welsh rarebit

vsWelsh rabbit

1 7.9

A hot dish of melted cheese mixed with beer served on toasted bread

has identical meaning but differs only as an alternative name

Surface Forms

Welsh rabbit singular

Welsh rabbits plural

Morphology

Welsh + rabbit

The phrase denotes a hot cheese-on-toast dish and has no semantic relation to either 'Welsh' (pertaining to Wales) or 'rabbit' (the animal); its meaning is historical/idiomatic (also known as 'Welsh rarebit'). A B1 learner who knows the constituent words would not predict this culinary meaning from the parts, so the expression is unpredictable and language-specific.

Etymology

Welsh rabbit is a joking name for a simple dish of melted cheese on toast. One popular story says people called it rabbit as a joke because families who could not afford real 'rabbit' meat would use cheese instead, so the name came to mean melted cheese on toast.