Parsley

How to spell parsley

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce parsley

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does parsley mean?

1. nounA green leafy herb with curled or flat leaves, used to flavour and garnish food.

Parsley in a sentence

• She chopped a handful of fresh parsley over the roasted potatoes.

• The recipe calls for a tablespoon of dried parsley in the sauce.

Where does parsley come from?

Language of origin: Greek

Parsley comes ultimately from the Greek petroselinon, a compound of petros, meaning 'rock' or 'stone', and selinon, the Greek name for celery and related plants; the literal sense was therefore 'rock celery', a reference to the herb's habit of growing on stony ground. The Romans borrowed this as the Latin petroselinum, which was gradually worn down in everyday speech to forms like petrosilium. From there it passed into Old French as peresil and into Old English as petersilie, and the two streams eventually merged and contracted into the Middle English persely. The familiar modern spelling 'parsley' settled by the late medieval period, with the original three middle syllables collapsed almost beyond recognition. That long erosion is exactly why the word looks so unlike its Greek ancestor today, and why the spelling has to be learned as a single shape rather than reasoned out.

How the word is built

• pars- (from Greek petros: rock/stone)
• -ley (from Greek selinon: celery, parsley)