Pre-1150 (Old English)

fēdan: "to nourish, give food to, sustain" — the base verb, from Proto-Germanic *fōdjan, ultimately PIE *peh₂- ("to guard, graze, feed").

1570s–1580s (agriculture/animals/plants)

First noun use of "feed" (1575, George Gascoigne): fodder given to livestock. Still the everyday sense today ("chicken feed"). This branch stays agricultural — it's not the one that leads to "news feed."

1660s (mechanics — the branch that matters)

"Feeder" as a mechanical apparatus for conveying material into a machine. This is the actual ancestor of every later technical sense: not "feeding" as in nourishment, but "feeding" as in material moving continuously through a system, unattended.

1790s (streams)

Extended to watercourses that supply a larger body of water ("feeder stream") — the same idea applied to nature: a smaller continuous source feeding a larger one.

1850s (infrastructure)

Applied to roads and railroads that channel traffic into a larger route ("feeder road/line").

1892 (mechanics, formalized)

"Feed" as a noun meaning the system or action of continuously supplying raw material to machinery — the sense now fully detached from food.

Early–mid 1900s (wire services)

"Wire feed" / "news feed": a continuous stream of copy from AP, UPI, Reuters etc., arriving unattended over teletype. The literal image is paper being fed through a printing telegraph — a direct extension of the 1660s/1892 mechanical sense, not a metaphor about feeding readers.

1920s (theatre)

"Feed" as a line/cue given to another performer to set up their response — a rare branch where the word returns to something closer to human exchange rather than machinery.

1950s (radio & television)

A live audio/video signal transmitted from a remote source into a studio or network ("satellite feed," "live feed") — the wire-service pattern reapplied to broadcast infrastructure.

1990s (finance)

Continuous stream of market data into a terminal ("data feed," "price feed") — running in parallel with the broadcast sense, same underlying structure: one source, many subscribers, continuous stream.

1999 (web/RSS)

"Feed" as a machine-readable, subscribable stream of web content (RSS/Atom). Not a new coinage — the wire-service model (one publisher, one canonical stream, many pulling subscribers) moved onto XML and HTTP largely unchanged.

2006 onward (social media)

Facebook's "News Feed" repurposes the term again, this time for an algorithmically curated stream of updates rather than a raw, unfiltered one — a real break from every prior sense, where the feed was just relayed, not ranked. This is the sense that dominates casual usage now.

References