Groceries

How to spell groceries

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce groceries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does groceries mean?

1. nounFood and household items bought from a shop or supermarket.

Groceries in a sentence

• He unloaded the groceries from the car and stacked them on the counter.

• The weekly groceries now cost far more than they did a year ago.

Where does groceries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin grossus, meaning 'thick' or 'large', which gave rise to the Medieval Latin grossarius, a merchant who dealt in goods sold in bulk or 'in gross' rather than in small retail quantities. This passed into Anglo-French and Old French as grossier, and English adopted it as 'grocer' in the late fourteenth century for a trader in such staples as sugar, spices, dried fruit and tea. From 'grocer' came 'grocery' for the trade and the shop, and by the eighteenth century the plural 'groceries' settled into its modern sense of the food and household supplies one buys there. The same grossus root sits behind the familiar word 'gross', a reminder that the original idea was bulk and quantity. The spelling trap lies in the soft middle: the 'c' is sounded as an 's', and the unstressed vowel after it is an easily dropped schwa.

How the word is built

• grocer (one who sells food and household goods)
• -y (forming the trade/shop noun)
• -ies (plural)