granary

Etymology

It is borrowed from Latin grānārium,^[2][3][4] usually found in the plural grānāria,^[5][6][7] from grānum (“grain”) with the suffix that gave English -ary.^[3][5][8] Etymonline traces the Latin noun to Proto-Indo-European *gre-no- (“grain”),^[7] and the American Heritage Dictionary files it under Proto-Indo-European *gə-no-.^[9] Some obsolete English forms were influenced by grain,^[2] and garner is a doublet.^[10]

Earliest recorded meaning

A storehouse for threshed grain: the OED's first record is in Levens's Manipulus Vocabulorum of 1570,^[2] the date Barnhart and Merriam-Webster also give.^[3][4] Etymonline says 1560s,^[7] and Dictionary.com 1560–70.^[8]

Semantic evolution

The transferred use is as old as the first record: a 1570 translation of Nowell's Catechism already has it, and the word came to be said chiefly of a country or region that grows plenty of grain and supplies others with it.^[2] Johnson (1755) defined it as a storehouse for threshed corn, and quoted Thomson's "exhaustless granary of a world" for the wider use.^[11] A slang use for the stomach appears in Egan's Book of Sports (1832).^[12] Ruskin used it as a verb, to store in a granary, in Unto this Last (1862).^[2] The newest sense is a proprietary name for a brown flour with malted wheat grains and for bread made from it, in the Trade Marks Journal of 1935, originally and chiefly British.^[2][13]

Timeline

• 1570 – a storehouse for threshed grain; also figuratively, a region rich in grain.^[2][3] Etymonline dates the word to the 1560s.^[7]
• 1832 – slang, the stomach.^[12]
• 1862 – verb, to store in a granary.^[2]
• 1935 – Granary, a proprietary name for a malted brown flour and its bread.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. A building or room for storing threshed grain: Rats had got into the village granary.^[13][4][2]
2. A region that grows a great deal of grain and supplies other places with it: The river valley was the granary of the province.^[13][4][2]
3. Granary: a trademarked brown flour containing malted wheat grains, or bread made from it; also used as an adjective.^[13][2]

Word family

• granary weevil

Related words

• grain
• garner
• grange
• granule
• granite
• corn

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
4. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
5. ^ a b Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b c d Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
8. ^ a b Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
9. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
10. ^ Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
11. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
12. ^ a b Green, Jonathon (2010), Green's Dictionary of Slang, London: Chambers; digital ed. 2016–, https://greensdictofslang.com
13. ^ a b c d Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins