Smoothie

How to spell smoothie

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce smoothie

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does smoothie mean?

1. nounA thick, cold drink made by blending fruit, and often yoghurt or juice, into a smooth liquid.
2. nounA person who is suave, charming, and smoothly persuasive, often in a calculated way.

Smoothie in a sentence

• She blended frozen berries and banana into a thick smoothie for breakfast.

• The salesman was a real smoothie, talking the couple into a far bigger purchase.

• The juice bar charges extra to add protein powder to a smoothie.

• Everyone at the office knew him as a confident smoothie who never lost his composure.

Where does smoothie come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word smooth descends from the Old English smoth, meaning even, level, or free from roughness, a sense that has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years. The familiar -ie ending is a noun-forming suffix, originally a diminutive or familiar tag, that English readily attaches to adjectives and nouns to coin casual everyday words. As a label for a thick blended fruit drink, smoothie is a twentieth-century American coinage, named for the velvety, lump-free texture of the puree, and it spread rapidly with the health-food and juice-bar boom of the late 1900s. An older, more informal use describes a person who is suave, polished, and persuasive in manner, again drawing on the figurative idea of smoothness. The spelling trap is simply the silent finish: writers must keep the -th of smooth and then add -ie rather than -y, since the y-spelling is not standard for this word.

How the word is built

• smooth (from Old English smoth: even, free of roughness)
• -ie (noun-forming suffix)