Lager

How to spell lager

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lager

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lager mean?

1. nounA pale, light, effervescent beer that is brewed by slow fermentation and matured at a low temperature.

Lager in a sentence

• He ordered a pint of cold lager to go with his lunch.

• The brewery is best known for its crisp lager rather than its dark ales.

Where does lager come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the German Lagerbier, literally 'storehouse beer', which English shortened simply to 'lager'. The first part, Lager, meant a store, a warehouse, or a resting place, and it traces back to a Germanic root meaning 'to lie down' or 'to be laid out', the same family that gives English the verb 'to lay'. The beer earned the name because it was brewed and then left to mature in cool cellars or cold caves for weeks before drinking, so it was beer that had been 'stored' rather than served fresh. English drinkers picked the word up in the middle of the 1800s as this cold-conditioned, bottom-fermented style spread out from Bavaria and Bohemia across Europe. The spelling trap is the single, undoubled 'g' and the unstressed '-er' ending that sounds the same as the '-er' in 'logger', so the vowel and consonant choices both have to be remembered.

How the word is built

• lager (from German Lager: storehouse, store)
• the word kept whole when borrowed into English