Ginger

How to spell ginger

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ginger

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ginger mean?

1. nounA pungent aromatic root used as a spice in cooking and baking, or the plant it comes from.
2. adjectiveOf a reddish or orange-brown colour, especially used to describe hair or fur.

Ginger in a sentence

• noun

  The recipe calls for a tablespoon of grated fresh ginger.

• adjective

  The toddler had bright ginger curls just like his mother.

• noun

  She stirred a little ground ginger into the biscuit dough.

• adjective

  A fluffy ginger cat dozed on the windowsill in the afternoon sun.

Where does ginger come from?

Language of origin: Sanskrit

Ginger has travelled an extraordinary distance to reach the English kitchen. Its ultimate source is the Sanskrit word that scholars reconstruct as srngavera, which literally meant 'horn-shaped body', from srnga 'horn' and vera 'body', a vivid description of the knobbly, antler-like root. That word passed into Greek as zingiberis and then into Latin as gingiber or zingiber. Old English borrowed an early form as gingifer, and the spelling was later reshaped by the Old French gingivre into the modern form we now write. The adjective sense describing reddish hair came much later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by comparison with the warm brownish-orange colour of the spice itself.

How the word is built

• ginger (whole root word, from Latin gingiber via Old French; no separable prefix or suffix)