Wellington

How to spell wellington

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce wellington

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wellington mean?

1. nounA waterproof rubber or leather boot that reaches the knee or calf.
2. nounA dish of meat, classically beef, coated in pâté and baked in pastry.

Wellington in a sentence

• She pulled on a wellington before walking across the muddy field.

• The restaurant served a beef wellington wrapped in golden puff pastry.

• The flooded garden meant he needed a sturdy wellington on each foot.

• He spent all afternoon preparing a salmon wellington for the dinner party.

Where does wellington come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is an eponym: it comes directly from the title of Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, the British commander who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. The Duke himself took his title from the small Somerset town of Wellington, an Old English place name that probably combined a personal name with 'tun', meaning an enclosure or farmstead. After Waterloo the Duke became a celebrity, and London tailors and bootmakers attached his name to fashions he favoured, most famously a tall leather riding boot he had made to protect the leg. By the 1820s 'wellington' was the ordinary English word for that boot, and the name later stuck to the rubber waterproof version still worn today. The same surname was borrowed for the classic beef dish wrapped in pastry, and the spelling trap is simply remembering the double 'l' and single 't' carried over from the original town name.

How the word is built

• Wellington (surname/title of the Duke of Wellington)
• -on (already part of the place name from which the title was taken)