Pantry

How to spell pantry

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pantry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pantry mean?

1. nounA small room or cupboard used for storing food and kitchen provisions.

Pantry in a sentence

• She kept the tinned tomatoes and dried pasta in the pantry.

• The new kitchen has a walk-in pantry next to the fridge.

Where does pantry come from?

Language of origin: French

Pantry came into English in the 1300s from the Old French paneterie, the place where bread was kept and the office of the panetier, the household servant in charge of bread. That word traces straight back to the Latin panis, which simply meant 'bread'. The original sense was very literally a bread store, but as kitchens and larders developed the meaning broadened to a cool room or cupboard for storing food and provisions of every kind. The same panis root quietly survives in other English borrowings such as 'pannier' (originally a bread basket) and in the Italian 'panini'. The spelling trap is that the modern word has nothing obvious to do with pans for cooking; the 'pan' is really the Latin word for bread, which is worth remembering when the word feels oddly assembled.

How the word is built

• pan- (from Latin panis: bread)
• -try (place suffix, from Old French -erie)