Supermarket

How to spell supermarket

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce supermarket

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does supermarket mean?

1. nounA large self-service shop selling food, drink, and household goods.

Supermarket in a sentence

• She pushed her trolley through the busy supermarket after work.

• The new supermarket on the high street stays open until midnight.

Where does supermarket come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word joins the prefix super-, from Latin super meaning 'above' or 'beyond', to market, which traces back through Old French to the Latin mercatus, the noun for trade or a trading place, itself from mercari 'to trade' and the root merx 'goods, merchandise'. The same merx root gives English a whole family of commercial words, including merchant, commerce, and mercenary. Supermarket is a comparatively recent American coinage from the 1930s, when large self-service stores began to replace the small counter-served grocery; the super- prefix signalled that the new shops were bigger and carried far more than the traditional market. The word spread quickly to British and Canadian English as the same retail model took hold after the Second World War. Because it is simply two familiar pieces stuck together, the spelling holds no real trap beyond remembering it is written as a single solid word.

How the word is built

• super- (above, beyond)
• market (a place for buying and selling, from Latin mercatus 'trade')