Sugar

How to spell sugar

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sugar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sugar mean?

1. nounA sweet crystalline substance obtained chiefly from sugar cane and beet, used to flavour food and drink.
2. verbTo sweeten or coat something with sugar.

Sugar in a sentence

• noun

  He stirred two spoons of sugar into his coffee.

• verb

  Bakers often sugar the top of a fruit tart before serving.

• noun

  The recipe calls for a cup of brown sugar.

• verb

  She likes to sugar her tea lightly rather than leave it plain.

Where does sugar come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

This word travelled an unusually long way before reaching English. Its ultimate ancestor is the Sanskrit word sharkara, which literally meant 'grit' or 'ground grain' and came to describe the granules of crystallised cane juice. From India the word and the substance passed into Persian as shakar and then into Arabic as sukkar, and Arab traders carried both across the Mediterranean during the medieval period. It entered medieval Latin as succarum and Old French as sucre, and English picked it up in the 1200s. The odd spelling, an 's' that is sounded as 'sh', is a fossil of that winding route through several languages, which is exactly what makes the opening of the word a quiet trap for writers.

How the word is built

• sugar (a single borrowed morpheme; note the unexpected 'su' spelt with an 's' but pronounced 'sh')