Kitchen

How to spell kitchen

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce kitchen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does kitchen mean?

1. nounA room or area equipped for preparing and cooking food.

Kitchen in a sentence

• She renovated the kitchen before putting the house on the market.

• The new flat has a small kitchen with a built-in oven.

Where does kitchen come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word kitchen comes from the Old English cycene, the room set aside for cooking, which was itself borrowed long before from the Latin coquina, meaning 'kitchen' or 'cookery'. That Latin noun grew out of the verb coquere, meaning 'to cook', the same root that gives us 'cook', 'concoct', and 'biscuit'. The Latin term spread across the early Germanic languages, surfacing as Küche in German and keuken in Dutch, all describing the place where food is prepared over heat. The soft 'tch' sound in the middle reflects how the original hard Latin 'c' was palatalised in Old English, which is why the spelling settled on the unexpected 'tch' cluster rather than a simple 'ch'. For most adult writers the only mild trap is remembering that single 't' before the 'ch', not a doubled or missing one.

How the word is built

• kitch- (from Latin coquere: to cook)
• -en (Old English noun ending denoting a place)