mess of pottage

1. 1.

   anything of trivial value

   “Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for a mess of pottage”

   Broadervalue

Questions about mess of pottage

What does mess of pottage mean?

mess of pottage means "anything of trivial value".

Is mess of pottage a common word?

mess of pottage is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.