Rosemary

How to spell rosemary

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce rosemary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rosemary mean?

1. nounAn evergreen Mediterranean shrub with fragrant needle-like leaves, used as a culinary herb.

Rosemary in a sentence

• She rubbed the lamb with garlic and fresh rosemary before roasting it.

• A low hedge of rosemary grew along the sunny side of the garden wall.

Where does rosemary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Rosemary comes from the Latin ros marinus, which literally meant 'dew of the sea', from ros 'dew' and marinus 'of the sea', a name that fit a fragrant shrub thriving along the dry, salty Mediterranean coast. The plant name passed into Old English as something close to 'rosmarine', and over the centuries English speakers quietly reshaped the unfamiliar Latin into two words they already knew, so 'ros' drifted toward 'rose' and 'marinus' toward the personal name 'Mary'. This folk reshaping is purely a sound association: the herb has nothing botanically to do with roses and nothing devotional to do with the Virgin Mary, even though later legends tried to link the two. That history is the spelling trap in a nutshell, because the word looks like rose plus Mary yet is written as one lowercase compound, rosemary. The modern form had settled by the late Middle Ages, and the same 'marinus' root for 'of the sea' still surfaces in everyday words such as marine and maritime.

How the word is built

• rose- (from Latin ros: dew)
• -mary (from marinus: of the sea), reanalysed in English as the familiar words rose and Mary