sugar

UK/ˈʃʊɡə/US/ˈʃʊɡɚ/

nounA1Very common — you will meet it every day · #922 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: sugars

Sugar is the white sweet grains you stir into tea and bake into cakes. A spoonful of sugar, brown sugar, cut down on sugar.

Table sugar is sucrose, from cane or beet, and the two are chemically identical. In baking it does far more than sweeten — it holds moisture, browns the crust and softens the crumb, which is why cutting it changes the texture. Note sugar as a mild exclamation instead of a stronger word; sugar the pill; and that sugar came into English from Arabic by way of the Crusades.

Definitions of sugar

1nounsugarThe sweet white substance used in food and drink.A1
“Do you take sugar in your coffee?”
- Said"Two sugars for me, please, and no milk."
- WrittenThe recipe called for less sugar than she expected, and the cake was better for it.
- UsedDissolve the sugar in warm water before adding the yeast.
- ContrastSugar, not honey. Honey is a liquid and tastes of flowers; sugar is dry and tastes of nothing but sweet. honey →
- Not thisFruit is not sugar, whatever the diet says. Sugar is the white stuff from the bag.
Patterna spoonful / a lump of sugar · brown / white / icing sugar · sugar in your tea · sugary

sugar is a sweetener.

Remember it

SUgar → the S says SH, as in SURE

Sure and sugar are the two everyday words where s sounds like sh: are you sure you want sugar in that?

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Where it comes from

Arabic sukkar came through Italian and Old French into English, and behind it lies Sanskrit sharkara, meaning gravel or grit — a fair description of the grains. Jaggery is the same word by another route.

Middle English
sugre
English, today
sugar

From Middle English sugre. Akin to Ancient Greek κρόκη (“pebble”), whence the words crocodile and krokodil are derived. a doublet of jaggery and sucro-. The verb is from Middle English sugren, from the noun.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in In the Kitchen

Practise this word

sugar in the wild

Table sugar, milk, or honey is often added to drinks and many prepared foods such as jam, biscuits, scones and cakes.
Carbohydrate
Low blood sugar may occur in otherwise healthy newborns who have not eaten for a few hours.
Hypoglycemia
Sucrose is especially concentrated in sugarcane and sugar beet, making them efficient for commercial extraction to make refined sugar.
Sugar
Lactose is the only sugar that cannot be extracted from plants, as it occurs only in milk, including human breast milk, and in some dairy products.
Sugar
A sugar beet is a plant whose root contains a high concentration of sucrose and is grown commercially for sugar production.
Sugar beet

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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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Definitions of sugar

1nounsugarThe sweet white substance used in food and drink.A1

“Do you take sugar in your coffee?”

Said"Two sugars for me, please, and no milk."
WrittenThe recipe called for less sugar than she expected, and the cake was better for it.
UsedDissolve the sugar in warm water before adding the yeast.
ContrastSugar, not honey. Honey is a liquid and tastes of flowers; sugar is dry and tastes of nothing but sweet. honey →
Not thisFruit is not sugar, whatever the diet says. Sugar is the white stuff from the bag.

Patterna spoonful / a lump of sugar · brown / white / icing sugar · sugar in your tea · sugary

sugar is a sweetener.