Livery

How to spell livery

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce livery

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does livery mean?

1. nounA distinctive uniform, or a distinctive colour scheme and design used to identify an organisation, its staff, or its vehicles.
2. nounA stable where horses are kept, fed, and cared for in return for payment, or are hired out.

Livery in a sentence

• The airline repainted its fleet in a bold new livery.

• She paid a monthly fee to keep her horse at the local livery.

• Hotel doormen wore the dark green livery of the company.

• The old coaching inn ran a livery for travellers' horses.

Where does livery come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the Old French livree, which meant an allowance or ration handed out, especially the food and clothing a lord dispensed to his retainers. That noun was built on the verb livrer, meaning 'to deliver' or 'to hand over', which traces back to the Latin liberare, 'to set free' or 'to release'. English took the word in the 1300s, and the sense narrowed from the general handout to the distinctive clothing given to a household's servants, the uniform that marked whose service they belonged to. From there it broadened again to mean any distinctive colour scheme or branding, which is why aircraft and delivery vans are still said to wear a company livery today. A separate strand gave us the livery stable, originally a place that supplied the keep (the 'delivery' of feed and care) for hired or boarded horses; the spelling trap is the unstressed middle, since the word is built on 'liver-' plus '-y' rather than the more familiar '-ary' ending.

How the word is built

• liver- (from Old French livree: an allowance dispensed to servants)
• -y (noun suffix)