Jewelry

How to spell jewelry

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce jewelry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does jewelry mean?

1. nounDecorative items such as rings, necklaces, and bracelets, often made from precious metals and stones.

Jewelry in a sentence

• She locked her grandmother's jewelry in the hotel safe.

• The store sells fine jewelry alongside designer watches.

Where does jewelry come from?

Language of origin: French

The word goes back to the Old French jouel or joel, the term for a small precious ornament, which English adopted in the Middle Ages as 'jewel'. Many trace that French word to the Latin jocale, meaning a plaything or trinket, which itself grew from jocus, the Latin word for 'jest' or 'play'; if that link is right, then jewels were once thought of, charmingly, as delightful little playthings. To 'jewel' English later added the collective suffix -ry, which gathers many things of one kind under a single label, much as 'pottery' or 'machinery' do. This produced 'jewelry', a word treating an assortment of jewels as one mass. The American and Canadian form keeps the short spelling 'jewelry', while British writers expand the same word to 'jewellery' with a doubled 'l' and an extra 'e', which is the source of the recurring spelling difficulty for people who read across both dialects.

How the word is built

• jewel (a precious stone or ornament)
• -ry (collective noun suffix)

British and American spelling

Jewelry is the American spelling. British English spells it jewellery.