Calorie

How to spell calorie

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce calorie

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does calorie mean?

1. nounA unit measuring the energy provided by food or released as heat.

Calorie in a sentence

• The label shows the calorie count for each serving.

• A brisk walk can burn roughly one calorie per step.

Where does calorie come from?

Language of origin: French

This word goes back to the Latin calor, which simply meant 'heat' or 'warmth', the same root that sits inside words like 'caloric' and 'scald'. The modern term was coined in French as 'calorie' in the early 1800s, when physicists needed a precise unit for measuring quantities of heat. It crossed into English around the 1860s as a scientific term, defined as the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of water by a fixed amount. Later, in the early twentieth century, nutritionists borrowed the unit to describe the energy released by food as the body burns it, which is the everyday meaning most people use today. The spelling keeps the single 'l' and the '-ie' ending of its French parent, which is the small trap: writers sometimes double the 'l' or reach for '-ory'.

How the word is built

• calor- (from Latin calor: heat)
• -ie (noun suffix)