Cucumber

How to spell cucumber

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cucumber

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cucumber mean?

1. nounA long, green, cylindrical fruit with watery flesh, eaten raw in salads or pickled.

Cucumber in a sentence

• She sliced a cucumber for the summer salad.

• The recipe calls for one cucumber and two tomatoes.

Where does cucumber come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin cucumis (stem cucumer-), the everyday Roman name for the long green gourd we still grow today. It travelled into English through Old French, where the forms cocombre and coucombre were current, and it first appears in English around the late 1300s. For several centuries English writers spelled it in many ways, including 'cowcumber', which actually reflected how it was once pronounced. The modern spelling 'cucumber' eventually settled to mirror the Latin root more closely, which is why the ending is -ber rather than the -ple or -per a speller might expect. The plant itself belongs to the same family as melons and squash, and the chilled, watery flesh of the fruit gave rise to the familiar phrase 'cool as a cucumber'.

How the word is built

• cucum- (from Latin cucumis: cucumber)
• -ber (English reshaping of the Latin stem ending)