Cinnamon

How to spell cinnamon

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cinnamon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cinnamon mean?

1. nounA sweet, aromatic brown spice made from the dried inner bark of certain tropical trees, used in cooking and baking.

Cinnamon in a sentence

• She dusted cinnamon over the warm porridge before serving.

• The recipe calls for a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and a pinch of nutmeg.

Where does cinnamon come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word arrived in English in the 1400s through Old French canamomme and Latin cinnamomum, both taken from the Greek kinnamomon, the name the Greeks used for the fragrant inner bark of certain trees. The Greek term was itself borrowed from a Semitic source; a related form, qinnamon, appears in ancient Hebrew, and the trade in the spice almost certainly carried the word westward through Phoenician and other Near Eastern merchants. Because the spice was a luxury import, the name travelled with the goods rather than being coined locally, which is why its origins point back to the eastern Mediterranean rather than to Latin or French roots. The modern spelling settled on the doubled -nn- and the soft initial c (pronounced like s), and those two features are precisely where adult spellers slip, often writing a single n or starting with an s.

How the word is built

• cinnamon (single root, from Greek kinnamomon, a spice name; note the doubled -nn- and the unstressed -a-mon ending)