Jus

How to spell jus

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce jus

What does jus mean?

1. nounA thin sauce or gravy made from the natural juices given off by meat during cooking.

Jus in a sentence

• The chef spooned a rich beef jus over the sliced roast.

• The menu offered a roasted lamb shank served in its own jus.

Where does jus come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the French word jus, meaning simply 'juice', which English diners adopted in cookery during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the phrase 'au jus' for meat served in its own natural juices. The French term descends directly from the Latin ius, which meant 'broth', 'sauce', or 'juice', and that same Latin word is the distant ancestor of the everyday English 'juice' itself by way of Old French jus. The spelling is the trap: English speakers expect a 'juice'-like ending, but the culinary borrowing keeps the bare French form of just three letters with no 'e' and no 'ce'. It is worth noting that Latin had a separate homograph ius meaning 'law' or 'right', which survives in legal phrases such as jus soli, but the kitchen word and the law word are unrelated despite the identical look. The very brevity of jus, and its silent, French-flavoured pronunciation, is exactly why writers reach for the longer 'juice' by mistake.

How the word is built

• jus (French and Latin root meaning juice or broth; an unanalysable single root, no affixes)