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earthenware

UK/ˈəːθ(ə)nwɛː/
nounC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechmostly written

Other forms: earthenwares

Earthenware is thick pottery fired at a low heat. An earthenware bowl, glazed earthenware, a piece of earthenware.

It stays slightly porous, so it must be glazed to hold water, and it chips more readily than stoneware or porcelain. It is also the oldest pottery there is, and most of what archaeologists dig up is earthenware.

Zereshk at English Wikipedia · CC BY 2.5

Definitions of earthenware

  1. 1nounearthenwareThick pottery fired at a low heat.C1

    “We drank cider from heavy earthenware mugs at the farmhouse.”

earthenware is a pottery.

Where it comes from

Earthen plus -ware, recorded from the seventeenth century.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *wer-

  2. Middle English

    ware

  3. English

    ware

  4. English, today

    earthenware

From earthen + -ware, first recorded appearance in 1673. Compare aardewerk. ware comes from Middle English ware. From Middle English ware, from Old English waru, from Proto-West Germanic waru, from Proto-Germanic warō (“attention”) as in beware, in the sense of “an object of care, a valuable”, from Proto-Indo-European wer- (“to watch, keep guard”), whence also ward. Cognate with stq Were (“an item for exchange, barter, or sale; ware”), Dutch waar (“goods offered for sale or use; ware”), German Ware (“ware”), Danish -, Norwegian Bokmål -, Norwegian Nynorsk vare (“ware”), Faroese vøra (“ware”), Icelandic - and Swedish vara (“ware”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Materials & Substances, Antiques & Collecting

Practise this word

earthenware in the wild

  • The term is used for earthenware objects of certain types, as set out below.

    Terracotta

  • Neither pottery such as utilitarian earthenware nor East Asian and European sculpture in porcelain are covered.

    Terracotta

  • Basic earthenware, often called terracotta, absorbs liquids such as water.

    Earthenware

  • After it is fired, earthenware is opaque and non-vitreous, soft and capable of being scratched with a knife.

    Earthenware

  • Technically, lead-glazed earthenware, such as the French sixteenth-century Saint-Porchaire ware, does not qualify as faience, but the distinction is not usually maintained.

    Faience

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.