Mushroom

How to spell mushroom

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mushroom

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mushroom mean?

1. nounAn edible or sometimes poisonous fungus with a rounded cap on a stalk.
2. verbTo grow, multiply, or spread very rapidly.

Mushroom in a sentence

• noun

  She sliced a fresh mushroom into the omelette.

• verb

  The small startup began to mushroom into a global brand.

• noun

  The recipe calls for a single large mushroom per serving.

• verb

  Complaints can mushroom quickly once a story goes viral.

Where does mushroom come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English in the 1400s from the Old French mousseron, a name for an edible fungus, which in turn goes back to the Late Latin mussirio or mussirionem. The exact root is genuinely uncertain, though many scholars connect it to mousse, the French word for 'moss', since these fungi spring up in damp, mossy ground. The earliest English spellings were wildly varied, including 'muscheron' and 'musseroun', and only later did writers reshape it into 'mushroom', as if it combined 'mush' and 'room', a folk respelling that has nothing to do with its real meaning. The verb sense, 'to grow or spread very quickly', appeared in the 1700s and draws on the way a mushroom can seem to appear overnight. That tidy-looking 'mush' plus 'room' surface is exactly the trap, because it hides the foreign origin and tempts a doubled consonant.

How the word is built

• mushroom (single root; from Old French mousseron, the spelling later reshaped by folk association with 'mush' and 'room')