Cheddar

How to spell cheddar

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce cheddar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cheddar mean?

1. nounA firm, pale yellow cow's milk cheese with a savoury flavour that sharpens as it matures.

Cheddar in a sentence

• She grated a block of mature cheddar over the pasta bake.

• The ploughman's lunch came with a thick wedge of cheddar and pickle.

Where does cheddar come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Cheddar takes its name directly from the village of Cheddar in Somerset, in the south west of England, where this hard cow's milk cheese was first made and matured in the cool, humid caves of the Cheddar Gorge. The place name itself is very old and is thought to derive from an Old English word related to ceodor, meaning a pouch, bag, or hollow, a likely nod to the deep caves and ravine that mark the landscape. Cheese making there is recorded from at least the twelfth century, and by the time of Henry II the local cheese was prized enough to be bought for the royal household. The word shifted from naming a single village to naming a style of cheese made by a particular process, so cheddar is now produced all over the world rather than only in Somerset. Because the spelling simply preserves the English place name, the doubled middle letters and the unstressed final syllable are the only traps for a writer.

How the word is built

• cheddar (place name, the village of Cheddar in Somerset) used as a common noun