Why Isn’t “Grocery” Ordinarily a Singular Food Item?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Emily calling from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Hey, Emily, welcome to the show.

What would you like to talk with us about?

Oh, so I’m married to a Dutchman. He moved to Canada from the Netherlands. And he’s a native Dutch speaker who speaks English very well. But he often notices these oddities when I’m speaking, these little oddities of the English language. And when they come up, I often think of your show. And then finally one day one came up and I’m like, I really need to phone this in.

So my question is about the word grocery and groceries. So we were talking over dinner one night. And I mentioned that a local political comedy show was filming at the local Italian grocery. And my husband looked at me kind of funny. He’s like, grocery? Like a carton of milk, like cheese, right? Because, you know, to him, he hears me go for groceries. So I’m going to pick up groceries. And so he thinks, okay, so grocery singular is one item of food. Groceries is plural. And so he looks at me and he knows it’s kind of off and a little bit funny. And I’m like, yeah, that’s weird. Because the grocery is the store where I go to buy groceries.

So I thought, I need to phone A Way with Words and sort this out.

Where does this word come from?

Why is it plural means something different and singular something else?

Shaking his head at English for the thousandth time.

Yeah, that’s pretty much the very literal Dutchman, just kind of like, what are you saying?

Oh, yeah. And it really is one of those places where English shows off its willingness to just throw out the rules.

Yeah.

Let’s lets chase this kind of by by by century just to see what happened here and kind of like detectives look at this and just kind of figure out where it all fell apart.

Great.

so So grocery comes to us from French, as you might guess.

It’s kind of like if you know French at all, you can kind of figure this out.

And the first grocery in French was wholesale goods, somebody who sold, not somebody who sold it, but the goods themselves.

And you can see that in gross, G-R-O-S-S, if you think about bulk items as a gross of something, right?

Yeah.

And then it was the bulk items themselves, the wholesale goods, then became the word for the person who sold them.

And that word was borrowed into English as a grocer.

So G-R-O-S-S-E-R-I-E became G-R-O-C-E-R in English.

And that word stuck around for a long time.

By the 15th century in English, we got the grocery as the trade or profession of being a grocery.

So it wasn’t the story yet.

And it wasn’t an individual food item.

But it took until the mid-19th century, we’re talking, you know, 300 years,

Before it became the store itself that sold food and household items.

Now, what’s interesting is you can have a bakery.

It’s a place that you can sell baked goods, or it could be the store or the factory.

But the grocery was only ever the store, right? You don’t have a grocery factory.

And then something happened in the early 20th century where we took that term that referred to the store and people started using it to refer to the items that were sold in a grocery store, but only in the plural.

And there’s a word for this. It’s called a pluralitantum. So these are things like scissors and pants and glasses that exist pretty much mainly in their plural form.

And we don’t really talk about, most people don’t talk about a pant, except if you work in the business. A scissor, yeah. Yeah, I don’t have one glass. I have a monocle, right? I have glasses.

Some people talk about having passed me the scissor, but we all look at them as they’re weird. Usually we talk about them as scissors. And that’s what happened with groceries.

We only really refer to, I go to the store for groceries. If I go in and I buy a single banana, I don’t tell people they’ve bought a grocery. I just said I bought a banana.

Unless you’re my husband. Yeah, well, Dutch people are very straightforward and plain spoken. So we’ll give him that. That’s right. And that’s what we love about the Dutch.

So that’s kind of what happened here. It just kind of skipped the singular stage and went straight to plural and never was a singular for an individual item for sale. The only way it’s a singular is if it’s a store.

But it’s not a singular if it’s for an item for sale. And this shift happens because of what’s known as a metonymy. So this is when a term expands to refer to a whole group of items.

So anyway, to just kind of summarize this, grocery means the grocery store. We do this with pharmacy. We do this with bakery. Groceries mean food items because shopping involves multiple things.

And grocery doesn’t mean a single item because grocery originally referred to a trade or a place and not an individual product. Yeah, that’s great. Fantastic.

Emily, thanks so much for calling. As Grant always says, we love these moments of language friction between couples who come from different linguistic backgrounds.

So I hope you’ll call again and share more of them. Yeah, I’d love to. Thank you so much for having me. All right. Take care now. Give our best to your fella. Thank you. Bye. All right. Ciao.