Refinery

How to spell refinery

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce refinery

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does refinery mean?

1. nounAn industrial plant where a raw material such as crude oil, sugar, or metal is processed and purified into a usable product.

Refinery in a sentence

• The coastal refinery processes thousands of barrels of crude oil each day.

• A fire at the refinery disrupted regional fuel supplies for a week.

Where does refinery come from?

Language of origin: French

The word is built on the verb 'refine', which English assembled in the late 1500s from the prefix 're-' (again) and 'fine', meaning to make something pure or clear. 'Fine' itself traces back through Old French to the Latin 'finire', 'to finish or bring to completion', and the related 'finis', meaning 'end' or 'limit', the idea being that a refined material had reached its finished, faultless state. The '-ery' ending, also from French, marks a place where an activity is carried out, the same suffix that gives us 'bakery' and 'brewery'. So a refinery is literally 'a place where things are made pure again', a sense first applied to sugar works in the 1700s and then extended to oil and metals as industry grew. The spelling trap is that the verb 'refine' keeps its silent final 'e', but when '-ery' is added the 'e' is dropped, leaving refin-ery, not 'refineery'.

How the word is built

• re- (again)
• fine (to make pure, from Latin finire 'to finish, bring to a fine state')
• -ery (noun suffix for a place where work is done)