Nursery

How to spell nursery

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce nursery

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nursery mean?

1. nounA place where young children are cared for during the day, or a room in a home set aside for a baby.
2. nounA place where plants, trees or shrubs are grown and sold.

Nursery in a sentence

• The local nursery has a long waiting list for working parents.

• We bought three apple saplings from the garden nursery on Saturday.

• They painted the nursery pale yellow before the baby arrived.

• The nursery propagates thousands of seedlings each spring.

Where does nursery come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word grew out of the verb 'nurse', which English took from Old French norrice and ultimately from the Latin nutricia, a feminine form of nutricius meaning 'that which nourishes', itself from nutrire, 'to feed, suckle or nourish'. By the late 1300s a 'nursery' meant the act of nurturing, and soon afterwards it came to mean a room set aside for the care of young children. The same nourishing sense was carried over to plants in the 1500s, when a 'nursery' became a plot where seedlings and young trees were raised until they were strong enough to be planted out. The shared idea behind both meanings is simply careful feeding and rearing of something young. The spelling keeps the 'nurse' base intact and adds '-ery', so the tricky middle is just remembering the single 's' and the unstressed second vowel, written 'e'.

How the word is built

• nurse (from Latin nutrire: to nourish, suckle)
• -ery (suffix marking a place or activity)