Creole

How to spell creole

6 letters · 2 syllables

10 of the 70 people asked to spell creole in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

The most common mistake is creol. The letters people get wrong are highlighted.

creol creole

What people typed instead

• creol5 people

How to pronounce creole

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does creole mean?

1. nounA stable, fully developed natural language that emerged from the blending of two or more parent languages, often from an earlier pidgin.
2. nounA person descended from the early European or mixed settlers of a colonial region, especially the Caribbean or Louisiana.
3. adjectiveDescribing the cooking style of the Gulf Coast and Caribbean that blends European, African, and local ingredients.

Creole in a sentence

• noun

  The islanders speak a French-based creole at home and standard French at work.

• noun

  Her grandmother was a Louisiana creole with deep roots in the French Quarter.

• adjective

  The restaurant served a spicy creole shrimp dish over rice.

• noun

  Linguists study how a pidgin becomes a full creole within a generation.

• noun

  The museum traced how each creole family had farmed the delta for generations.

• adjective

  She added okra and tomatoes to give the stew a creole flavour.

Where does creole come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled a long way before settling into English. Its deepest root is the Latin verb creare, meaning 'to bring forth' or 'to produce', the same root that gives us 'create' and 'creature'. From this the Portuguese formed criar 'to raise or breed' and then crioulo, originally describing a servant or animal that had been raised in one's own household rather than imported. Spanish adopted a parallel form, criollo, applied to people of European descent who had been born and raised in the colonies. French reshaped the word as créole, and English borrowed that French form in the early 1600s, which is why the spelling keeps the bare -ole ending rather than a Spanish or Portuguese vowel. Over time the term broadened from people born in the colonies to the cultures, foods, and languages that grew up there.

How the word is built

• creol- (from Portuguese crioulo: a person or thing raised in the household)
• -e (French spelling)

People who misspell creole also struggle with

Of the Spelling Garden players who got creole wrong the first time, this is how many also got each of these wrong.

• connoisseur 100% of them got it wrong