curry
/ˈkɝi/noun, verb
Prepare food as sauce; groom a horse; seek favor
From Latin com- (With) + Proto-Germanic *raidaz (Arranged) + Tamil கறி (kaṟi) (Spiced sauce or relish).
Lineage
com-
raidaz
kari
coquere
The story
One spelling is carrying several passports. In medieval England, to curry meant to rub down a horse, traveling through Old French correier and Anglo-French curreier; the word was tied to the idea of putting something in order, ultimately involving Latin com-, “together,” and a Germanic family related to ready. “To curry favor” is an early-sixteenth-century reshaping of curry favel, literally “groom the chestnut horse,” because the horse Favel belonged to the medieval world of cunning and deceit; the phrase therefore began with a horse, not with polite networking. The food sense took a different route: Middle English cury appears in the 1390 Forme of Cury, while the modern dish sense was influenced by Tamil கறி (kaṟi), alongside cooking vocabulary from French cuyre and Latin coquere. Portuguese and British contact helped carry South Asian curry into a worldwide menu, where the same word can now describe both a simmering sauce and an old-fashioned way of polishing someone’s ego.
Modern usage
A derogatory term for a person from India, according to Urban Dictionary usage
- Heard in
- derogatory slang · Australian English
- See
- Urban Dictionary entry for curry
Words from the same roots
coquere · Latin, ‘Cook’
Derivedcuisine, cook, concoct, precocious