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DictionaryRoot: -erie
French

-erie

an activity, place, or collection

Forms

  • -erie
  • -ery — The usual English spelling of the borrowed ending.

Origin

Old French formations combining -ier or -er with -ie, ultimately drawing on Latin -arius and -ia.

Note

An activity and the place where it happens can receive names from the same ending.

6 / 8
Three eighteenth-century infantry soldiers fire a coordinated musket volley, with shouldered long flintlock muskets, small muzzle flashes and billowing white powder smoke making the gunfire unmistakable.
noun

musketry

MUS-kit-ree/ˈmʌskɪtri/

The use of muskets for shooting.

Etymology
musketFrenchmusket
+ryFrenchan activity, place, or collection

The ending gathers muskets into a collective: musketry originally meant muskets taken together. In the gunfire sense, the name shifts from the weapons collectively to the firing they produce.

Full entry

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