Candy

How to spell candy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce candy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does candy mean?

1. nounA sweet food made mainly from sugar, often flavoured or moulded into small pieces.
2. verbTo coat or preserve food, especially fruit or peel, by cooking it in sugar.

Candy in a sentence

• noun

  The children spent their pocket money on candy at the corner shop.

• verb

  The recipe asked her to candy the orange peel before adding it to the cake.

• noun

  A bowl of candy sat by the till for waiting customers.

• verb

  Chefs often candy slices of ginger to use as a garnish.

Where does candy come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

Candy travels through more languages than almost any sweet in the cupboard. The trail begins in Sanskrit khanda, meaning 'a piece' or 'a lump', which came to describe crystallised sugar broken into chunks. That sense passed into Persian as qand, meaning 'cane sugar', and then into Arabic as qandi, an adjective for something sugared. Medieval traders carried the word westward, and French speakers spoke of sucre candi, literally 'candied sugar'. English borrowed the term in the late 1300s, at first simply for crystallised sugar, and only later, especially in American usage, for sweets in general. Because the root really did mean a small broken piece, the modern spelling with a single 'd' and a plain '-y' has stayed reassuringly simple.

How the word is built

• cand- (from Arabic qandi/Persian qand: sugar)
• -y (noun ending)