Meaning & use
gruel
A thin, watery porridge made by boiling oats, rice, or other grain in water or milk.
See it in a sentence
The orphanage served a thin bowl of gruel for breakfast every morning.
Sailors on long voyages often survived on little more than gruel and hardtack.
A note on using this word
Gruel is strongly associated with poverty and hardship in literature, most famously in Dickens's Oliver Twist.
Words with a similar meaning
porridge
Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.
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