Picnic

How to spell picnic

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce picnic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does picnic mean?

1. nounA meal packed and eaten outdoors, typically on a trip or in a park.
2. verbTo eat a meal outdoors, away from home.

Picnic in a sentence

• noun

  They spread a blanket in the park for a family picnic.

• verb

  On warm Sundays they like to picnic beside the river.

• noun

  The picnic basket held sandwiches, fruit, and a flask of tea.

• verb

  The families gathered to picnic on the hillside before the concert.

Where does picnic come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the French pique-nique, which appears in the late 1600s and became common in the 1700s. It was a playful reduplication built on the verb piquer, meaning 'to pick' or 'to peck at' food, paired with nique, a word for something trifling or of little worth, so the whole expression suggested a casual meal nibbled at rather than a grand feast. In its earliest French and English use a picnic was not necessarily outdoors at all; it described a fashionable social gathering at which each guest contributed a share of the food or paid their part. English borrowed the word around 1748, and over the following century the meaning narrowed to the familiar idea of a meal eaten in the open air. The spelling can trip writers because the base form ends in a bare 'c', yet inflected forms such as picnicking and picnicked insert a 'k' to keep the hard sound.

How the word is built

• From French pique-nique, a reduplicative pairing: pique (to pick at food)
• nique (a small thing of little value)