Undereaten

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Having been consumed in insufficient quantities or not fully eaten
2. describing food that remains largely untouched or partially consumed
3. indicative of meals that are left incomplete or have too much left over

Etymology: The word is built from two plain English parts: the prefix "under-", inherited from Old English "under", and the verb "eat". Its underlying sense is simple: "under" meant "below" or "lesser" in the spatial and quantitative senses, so to undereat something is to take in less of it than is needed or expected. In this case the adjective describes food that has been left partly consumed, so the sense of "under" is closer to "short of" or "incompletely" than to position. The prefix itself has a long lineage. Its ancestors reach back to the Proto-Germanic "under", which passed into Old English as "under" and then through the Middle English period into modern English largely unchanged in form. "Eat" follows a similar path from Old English, so the compound is a native English formation rather than a borrowing.

Synonyms: insufficiently eaten, partially consumed