Breweries

How to spell breweries

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce breweries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does breweries mean?

1. nounBuildings or companies where beer is produced commercially.

Breweries in a sentence

• The city is famous for its small craft breweries that supply local pubs.

• Several family-owned breweries have operated in the valley for over a century.

Where does breweries come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word traces back to the Old English verb brēowan, meaning 'to make a fermented drink', which itself grew from a Germanic root tied to heating and bubbling, the same idea that survives in 'broth' and 'broil'. The noun 'brewer' described the person who did the work, and adding the place-forming suffix '-ery' gave 'brewery', a building where beer is made, a formation that became common in English in the seventeenth century. The plural shifts the final '-y' to '-ies', following the regular English rule for words ending in a consonant plus 'y'. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the 'brew' stem keeps its silent-feeling 'w' and is followed by the unstressed '-er-' before the plural ending, so writers often drop a letter or muddle the vowel run 'ew-er-ies'. Knowing that the word is simply 'brew' plus 'ery' plus the plural makes the chain of letters far easier to reconstruct.

How the word is built

• brew (root, from brēowan: to make beer)
• -ery (place where an activity happens)
• -ies (plural of -y)