Distillery

How to spell distillery

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce distillery

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does distillery mean?

1. nounA place or business where alcoholic spirits such as whisky, gin, or vodka are made by distillation.

Distillery in a sentence

• The family ran a small distillery in the highlands for three generations.

• The new gin distillery offers guided tours and tastings every weekend.

Where does distillery come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb distillare, which meant 'to drip down' or 'to trickle in small drops'. It was built from the prefix de- (here softened to dis-, meaning 'down') and stillare 'to drip', a verb that itself came from stilla, the Latin word for 'a drop'. The connection to dripping is no accident: distillation works by heating a liquid until it turns to vapour and then condensing it back into drops, so the very process names itself. English took 'distil' from Old French in the late 1300s, and by the seventeenth century the suffix -ery, marking a place where something is done, gave us 'distillery' for the building where spirits are produced. The doubled letters are the spelling trap here; the single l of 'distil' becomes a double l before the -ery ending, while the single l before the prefix area stays put.

How the word is built

• dis- (apart/down)
• still (from Latin stillare: to drip or trickle)
• -ery (place where an activity is carried out)