supermarket

UK/ˌsuːpəˈmɑːkɪt/US/ˌsupɚˈmɑɹkət/

nounA1Common in everyday speech and writing · #3,709 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: supermarkets

A supermarket is the big food shop with long shelves and trolleys. Aisles, a bakery smell pumped near the door, and a queue at the tills.

The format was invented in America in the 1930s and reached Britain after the war, replacing the separate butcher, baker and greengrocer. Americans usually say grocery store for the same thing. A hypermarket is bigger again, and a corner shop is the small survivor. The word gives us supermarket sweep and the whole vocabulary of trolleys, checkouts and loyalty cards.

Definitions of supermarket

1nounsupermarketA large self-service shop selling food and household goods.A1
“She stopped at the supermarket on the way home.”

Also accepted in games: grocery store

Where it comes from

Latin
super-
Middle English
super-
English
super
English, today
supermarket

Built from

super · Latin — above

American English, super- + market, 1933. super comes from super-, from Middle English super-, from Latin super-, from super (“above”). a doublet of over and hyper.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Shopping & Money, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 4 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

supermarket in the wild

A supermarket is a self-service shop offering a wide variety of food, beverages and household products, organized into sections under one roof.
Supermarket
The traditional supermarket occupies a large amount of floor space, usually on a single level.
Supermarket
Chen, 99 Ranch Market has grown into the largest Asian supermarket chain in the United States.
99 Ranch Market
The parent company Tawa Supermarket Inc. also owns 168 Market, a smaller Taiwanese-American supermarket chain which has six stores in California and Nevada.
99 Ranch Market
In 2005, Shun Fat Supermarket opened a 105,000-square-foot megastore in the Little Saigon of Westminster, California, joining the already highly competitive Vietnamese supermarket commerce in the community.
Shun Fat Supermarket

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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.

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