Barley

How to spell barley

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce barley

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does barley mean?

1. nounA hardy cereal grain used in food, animal feed, and the brewing of beer and whisky.

Barley in a sentence

• The farmer planted a field of barley next to the wheat.

• The soup was thickened with pearl barley and root vegetables.

Where does barley come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Barley comes from the Old English word baerlic, which began life as an adjective meaning 'of barley', built on the older noun bere, the Anglo-Saxon name for the grain itself. That bere goes back to a Germanic root shared with words for grain across the northern languages, and it survives today in the word 'barn', which was originally a bere-aern, literally a 'barley house' or store for grain. Over time the adjective baerlic was treated as a noun in its own right and the spelling settled into the modern barley. The grain has been cultivated in Britain for thousands of years and was a staple for bread, porridge, and brewing long before wheat dominated, which is why so many old English place names and surnames echo it. The unexpected twist is that the everyday 'barn' and the field crop 'barley' are quite literally the same word at the root.

How the word is built

• bar- (from Old English bere: barley)
• -ley (from -lic, the adjective ending meaning 'pertaining to')