Culinary

How to spell culinary

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce culinary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does culinary mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to cooking, the kitchen, or the preparation of food.

Culinary in a sentence

• The hotel is famous for its culinary standards.

• She enrolled in a culinary course to train as a chef.

Where does culinary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin culinarius, meaning 'belonging to the kitchen', which was built on the noun culina, the ordinary Latin word for a kitchen or cooking stove. The Latin culina itself appears to be a variant of coquina, 'kitchen', which traces back to coquere, 'to cook', the same root that gives English 'cook' and 'concoct'. English adopted culinary in the seventeenth century as a learned, slightly formal adjective for anything connected with cooking, and it has kept that refined flavour ever since, turning up more in writing about restaurants and recipes than in casual speech. The spelling trap lives in the first two syllables: the unstressed vowels make people unsure whether it begins 'cul-' or 'col-', and the middle 'i' is easy to swap for an 'a'. Remembering the Latin culina, the kitchen, anchors that opening 'cul-' and the 'i' that follows.

How the word is built

• culin- (from Latin culina: kitchen)
• -ary (adjective suffix meaning 'relating to')