curry

First recorded as "currey" in 1747, in the earliest published English recipe for the dish, from Tamil கறி (kaṟi). Its spelling was shaped by the older Middle English word cury, meaning "cooking," which came from Middle French cuyre ("to cook"), itself from Vulgar Latin cocere and Latin coquere.

The Tamil word for a spiced dish and the older English word for cooking in general converged, so the 1747 spelling "currey" blended a borrowed food name with a native word that already meant nothing more specific than "cooking." That earlier cury appears as far back as 1390, in the court cookbook Forme of Cury.

Cury traces back through Middle French cuyre to the same Vulgar Latin root that gives English "cuisine" — so curry and cuisine share a distant kitchen ancestor.