Dairy

How to spell dairy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dairy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dairy mean?

1. nounA place or business where milk is processed and milk products such as butter and cheese are made or sold.
2. adjectiveRelating to milk or the products made from milk.

Dairy in a sentence

• noun

  The local dairy delivers fresh milk to our doorstep each morning.

• adjective

  People who are lactose intolerant often avoid dairy products entirely.

• noun

  Workers at the dairy pasteurise the milk before it is bottled.

• adjective

  The recipe uses a dairy alternative made from almonds instead of cream.

Where does dairy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Dairy traces back to the Middle English word 'deierie', which named the part of a household where milk was handled and butter and cheese were made. That word was built on 'deye', meaning a female servant or milkmaid, which in turn came from the Old English 'dæge', literally a 'kneader of bread', a word closely related to 'dough'. Over time the human sense faded and the place sense took over, so by the late 1300s a dairy meant the room, building, or farm devoted to milk and its products. It is worth noting that the modern spelling has nothing to do with the unrelated word 'diary' (a daily record), which comes instead from the Latin 'dies' meaning 'day'; the two simply drifted into a similar shape. Remembering that dairy keeps the 'air' you might breathe in a cool milking room can help separate it from diary.

How the word is built

• dair- (from Middle English deye: dairymaid, milkmaid)
• -y (place/activity suffix)