Cookery

How to spell cookery

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cookery

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cookery mean?

1. nounThe art or practice of preparing and cooking food.

Cookery in a sentence

• She enrolled in an evening cookery class to improve her knife skills.

• The shelf was packed with regional cookery books from around the world.

Where does cookery come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The base word 'cook' descends from the Latin noun coquus, meaning 'a cook', and the related verb coquere, 'to cook or to boil'. Old English borrowed this Latin term early, giving the form 'coc', long before the Norman Conquest, which is unusual for a kitchen word since so many came later from French. The ending '-ery' arrived separately through Old French '-erie', a suffix that turns a doer or activity into the name of the art, trade, or place where it happens, the same element seen in 'bakery', 'brewery', and 'pottery'. Stuck together in Middle English, 'cookery' came to mean the practice or skill of preparing food, and by extension a book or course teaching it. The spelling trap sits in the middle: the unstressed '-er-' is a weak schwa that the ear barely registers, so writers are tempted to drop it or swap in '-ary', when the steady pattern is cook plus -ery.

How the word is built

• cook (to prepare food by heating)
• -ery (noun suffix: art, practice, or place of)