Celery

How to spell celery

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce celery

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does celery mean?

1. nounA pale green plant with long crisp stalks eaten raw or cooked as a vegetable.

Celery in a sentence

• She chopped a stick of celery into the soup pot.

• The lunch tray held carrot sticks and celery with a tub of dip.

Where does celery come from?

Language of origin: French

The word celery arrived in English around the late 1600s from the French céleri, which itself was borrowed from an Italian dialect form, seleri. Trace the line back further and you reach the Latin selinon and the Greek selinon, which named the wild celery or parsley plant that grew around the Mediterranean. The Greeks valued this aromatic plant long before it was cultivated as the crisp salad stalk we know today; ancient writers mention it as a garland plant and a flavouring herb. The shift from the plural-looking Italian seleri to the English singular celery is why the word ends in the soft, easily forgotten -ery rather than a doubled or harder ending. Because the spelling reflects French and Italian shaping rather than the original Greek, the single 'l' and the unstressed middle syllable are the spots writers second-guess.

How the word is built

• celery (from French céleri, ultimately from Greek selinon: parsley or celery plant)