Porcelain

How to spell porcelain

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce porcelain

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does porcelain mean?

1. nounA hard, white, translucent ceramic made by firing fine clay at high temperature, used for tableware, tiles, and ornaments.

Porcelain in a sentence

• The museum displayed a delicate porcelain teacup from the eighteenth century.

• She stored the antique porcelain figurines in a padded cabinet.

Where does porcelain come from?

Language of origin: French

Porcelain reaches English from the French porcelaine, which French had taken from the Italian porcellana. The surprising part is what porcellana first meant: it was the name of the glossy cowrie shell, and that name came from porcella, meaning a young sow or little pig (a diminutive of porca, sow). Renaissance traders thought the smooth, curved, shiny shell resembled a pig's back, so the shell carried the pig's name. When the same lustrous, translucent quality turned up in the fine Chinese ceramic that began arriving in Europe, people borrowed the shell's word for the pottery, and English adopted it in the 1500s. The buried pig is also the reason the spelling starts porc-, the same root that gives us pork, and the quiet middle vowel in porce-LAIN is the trap that makes adults pause.

How the word is built

• porcel- (from Italian porcella, a young sow, via the cowrie shell porcellana)
• -ain (anglicised French -aine ending)