Other forms: breads
Bread is the basic baked food made from flour and water. A loaf on the board, cut into slices for toast.
It is one of the oldest prepared foods there is, and English treats it as a mass noun, so you buy a loaf of bread rather than a bread. Around it sits a whole vocabulary — crust, crumb, dough, yeast, sourdough. The word carries an enormous amount of idiom about money and survival: earning your bread, the breadwinner of a family, and knowing which side your bread is buttered.
1nounbreadA staple food baked from flour, water and usually yeast.
“She cut four thick slices of bread.”
Old English brēad meant a fragment, a morsel, a piece broken off, and only later the whole loaf. The older root means to boil or to brew, which points at the yeast rather than the flour.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰrewh₁-
Middle English
bred
English, today
bread
Built from
From Middle English bred. From Middle English bred, breed, from Old English brēad (“fragment, bit, morsel, crumb", also "bread”), from Proto-West Germanic braud, from Proto-Germanic braudą (“bread”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰrewh₁- (“to boil; to brew”), from bʰer- (“to bear, carry”). Alternatively, from Proto-Germanic braudaz, brauþaz (“broken piece, fragment”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰera- (“to split, beat, hew, struggle”) (see brittle). Perhaps a conflation of the two. Possibly a a doublet of broa. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA