Garlic
nounA pungent bulb of the onion family, used in cooking and divided into segments called cloves.
How to spell garlic
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce garlic
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does garlic mean?
- nounA pungent bulb of the onion family, used in cooking and divided into segments called cloves.
Garlic in a sentence
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The recipe calls for two crushed cloves of garlic.
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She roasted a whole head of garlic until it turned soft and sweet.
Where does garlic come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Garlic is a thoroughly native English word, recorded in Old English as garleac. It was formed by joining two everyday Anglo-Saxon words: gar, meaning 'spear', and leac, meaning 'leek' or more broadly any edible bulb of the onion family. The name literally described a 'spear leek', a vivid reference to the long, spear-shaped green leaves that rise from the plant. The same gar (spear) survives in the old personal name Edgar and once lurked in the word for a needle-nosed fish, the garfish, while leac is the direct ancestor of the modern word 'leek'. Because the original leac shortened over the centuries to the unstressed ending -lic, the spelling traps many writers into reaching for a doubled 'ck'; remembering the hidden 'leek' helps fix the single 'c' ending.
How the word is built
- gar (spear)
- lic (from Old English leac: leek)
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