Cereal

How to spell cereal

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cereal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cereal mean?

1. nounA breakfast food made from processed grain, usually eaten with milk.
2. nounA cultivated grass, such as wheat, oats, or barley, grown for its edible grain.

Cereal in a sentence

• He poured milk over a bowl of cereal before work.

• Wheat is the most widely grown cereal in the region.

• The supermarket stocks a whole aisle of breakfast cereal.

• The farmer rotated his cereal with a season of legumes.

Where does cereal come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin adjective cerealis, meaning 'relating to grain' or 'of cultivated crops'. It was formed from the name Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, harvests, and especially the growing of grain. English adopted the word in the early 1800s, first as an adjective describing edible grains such as wheat, oats, and barley, and soon afterwards as a noun for those crops themselves. The familiar sense of a packaged breakfast food made from processed grain grew up later, particularly through the food industry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The link back to the goddess Ceres is the key to the spelling: it begins with 'cere', not 'seri', which is exactly why it is so easily swapped with its soundalike 'serial'.

How the word is built

• cere- (from Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain and agriculture)
• -al (adjective/noun suffix)

Words that sound like cereal

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• serial: Arranged in or happening as a connected series, one after another.