Deli
nounA shop or counter selling cooked meats, cheeses, salads, and other prepared or speciality foods.
How to spell deli
4 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce deli
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does deli mean?
- nounA shop or counter selling cooked meats, cheeses, salads, and other prepared or speciality foods.
Deli in a sentence
-
On the way home she stopped at the deli for sliced ham and olives.
-
The corner deli makes fresh sandwiches to order every morning.
Where does deli come from?
Language of origin: Other
The word 'deli' is a casual twentieth-century shortening of 'delicatessen', a shop selling prepared and imported foods. English took 'delicatessen' from German, where Delikatessen was the plural of Delikatesse, meaning a delicacy or fine food. The German word had itself been borrowed from the French délicatesse, 'delicacy', which traces back to the Latin delicatus, meaning 'giving pleasure, soft, dainty', and ultimately to delicere, 'to allure or delight'. The term arrived in American English in the late 1800s with German immigrant food shops, and the breezy clipped form 'deli' became common from around the 1950s. Because the long parent word ends in '-essen', many writers expect the short form to keep a double letter, but 'deli' is simply spelled with one l and one i.
How the word is built
- clipping of delicatessen: delicat- (from Latin delicatus, giving 'delight, delicacy')
- -essen (German for 'to eat/foods')
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.