Masonry

How to spell masonry

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce masonry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does masonry mean?

1. nounBrickwork or stonework forming part of a building or other structure.

Masonry in a sentence

• The surveyor found cracks running through the old masonry at the back of the house.

• Weathered masonry around the chimney needed repointing before winter.

Where does masonry come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travels back to the Old French maçonerie, the work of a maçon, meaning a builder in stone. The maçon itself is thought to be of Germanic origin, related to a root meaning 'to make' or 'to fashion', and it passed into French and then into English in the 1300s. Early on the term covered both the craft of cutting and laying stone and the finished stone fabric of a wall or building. Over time English narrowed the everyday meaning to the structural work itself, the brick and stone you can see in a building, while a separate sense attached to Freemasonry, the fraternal society whose lodges borrowed the imagery of medieval stonemasons. The spelling trap is the ending: it is the bare '-ry' added to mason, not '-ery', so there is no extra vowel between the 'n' and the 'r'.

How the word is built

• mason (stoneworker, from Old French maçon)
• -ry (noun suffix for a craft, trade, or its product)