Brie

How to spell brie

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce brie

What does brie mean?

1. nounA soft, mild cow's milk cheese with a pale edible rind, originally from the Brie region of France.

Brie in a sentence

• She spread warm brie on a slice of toasted baguette.

• The cheese board offered a wedge of brie beside the grapes and crackers.

Where does brie come from?

Language of origin: French

Brie takes its name straight from the Brie region of northern France, the rolling countryside east of Paris where this soft cow's milk cheese has been made for centuries. The place name itself is thought to descend from a Gaulish, that is early Celtic, word meaning 'marsh' or 'low, damp ground', a fitting description of the area's terrain. The cheese was famous well before it had a tidy single label; medieval records praise the soft white rounds of the district, and one charming tradition holds that it was crowned the 'king of cheeses' at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. English simply borrowed the French place name wholesale, which is why the spelling keeps the French '-ie' ending rather than anglicising to something like 'bree'. That foreign ending is the small trap: the word sounds exactly like 'bree', but it is written brie because it is, in effect, a French postcode on a label.

How the word is built

• brie (a proper name: the Brie region of northern France, used directly as the cheese name)