Food & drinkMyths & disputes

curry

Tamil kaṟi is a sauce or relish eaten with rice; the Portuguese wrote it caril, and English curry followed in the 1680s, later becoming a catch-all for spiced Indian dishes. The British navy took curry to Meiji Japan, where karē became a national dish, and post-war Berlin invented Currywurst.

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The story you may have heard

That curry is an old English word from medieval cury 'cookery', as in The Forme of Cury (1390): that word may have influenced the spelling, but the dish's name came from Tamil.

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1000Tamil

Hops are evenly spaced; labels show the year each form is first attested.

curry

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The road to English

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