Carmel vs. Caramel—Which Is Correct? (2024)

FAQs

Carmel vs. Caramel—Which Is Correct? ›

Carmel and caramel are not different spellings of the same word. Caramel is the correct spelling if you're talking about food or colors. Carmel is a misspelling when used in those contexts, but it is a word that can be used as a name for people or places.

Difference Between Carmel vs Caramel

Many people accidentally spell caramel as Carmel, which is incorrect. The spelling Carmel, without the second A, should only be used as a proper noun that describes a person or a place.

People on the east coast from Maine to Florida and throughout the south, including Atlanta, Mississippi, Louisiana, and parts of Texas tend to pronounce it like car-a-mel according to the Harvard Dialect Survey. People from the West coast tend to use two syllables instead of three, pronouncing it, car-muhl.

The differences between pronunciation have to do with where you are from. The Cambridge Dictionary supports two correct English pronunciations of the word caramel. According to Cambridge Dictionary, the UK's pronunciation focuses more heavily on the care-a-mel. While in the US, it focuses more heavily on the car-a-mel.

To make it clear, Caramel is a toffee-like confection made by boiling down sugar. The English word apparently dates back at least to the 1800's. Carmel, on the other hand, is the name of some geographic locations such as Mount Carmel. The word is NOT pronounced or spelled Caramel.

If you are from southern Texas, the Deep South or many of the Southern states or the Eastern seaboard, even up into and throughout Maine, you probably pronounce this yummy word with THREE syllables 'care- uh- mell'.

The disappearance of that second syllable -uh- in the final pronunciation seems to have been in the works for a long time. The word has been in English since the 18th century, which it came via French from the Spanish caramel. Order that caramel ice cream sundae however you like!

Caramel is the correct spelling if you're talking about food or colors. Carmel is a misspelling when used in those contexts, but it is a word that can be used as a name for people or places.

The disappearance of the second syllable in how North Americans pronounce "caramel" is one of the factors why this word is frequently pronounced "carmel" and misspelled. In contrast, "Carmel" is a proper noun with only two syllables: car-mel and pronounced kar-mel.

Coming from Philadelphia I. always said car-mel but people tell me that the correct. pronunciation is car-a-mel.

How does the East Coast say caramel? ›

According to Eat This, Not That!, at least two distinct pronunciations of caramel are used widely in different parts of the U.S. If you ask people from the Southeast and East Coast what those brown, chewy, or brittle candies are called, they're likely to say car-uh-mel.

We don't have full-fledged polling data to back it up, but we did ask the Southern Living office, and pronunciations here are rather varied. Of those polled, 10 people say "puh-KAHN", four say "PEE-can", and two say "puh-can" or "puh-CAN," a hybrid of the former pronunciations with two similarly stressed syllables.

synonyms: buff, caramel brown, raw sienna, yellowish brown. types: snuff-color, snuff-colour. dark yellowish brown. type of: brown, brownness.

You see, the word caramel is derived from the 18th-century Spanish turned French word caramelo, which is pronounced as car-a-mello. So, North American English speakers adopted the "car" pronunciation from the original word, whereas British speakers tend to pronounce caramel as "care-a-muhl."

Originally Answered: Why do the Yanks say “soder” when it's spelt “solder” and pronounced as “ solder”? Because “soder” was how British speakers pronounced the word until the early 19th century. The word entered English from Norman French souder and at first wasn't usually written with an l.

A gender-neutral name of Hebrew origin, Carmel translates to “garden,” “orchard,” and “vineyards of God.” There are plenty of landmarks with this name, from Mount Carmel, a mountain range in Israel, to Carmel-by-the-Sea, the small beach city in California.

The "sodder" pronunciation is actually older. The word is from French "souder," but the L was put into the spelling on the basis of the Latin etymology (related to "solid"), and eventually a lot of people started pronouncing the L.

In English, the word comes from French (caramel), which was borrowed from the Spanish caramelo. Another likely origin story is that the word is from the Latin phrase calamellus, which means “sugar cane,” which in turn finds its roots in the Greek word calamus, which means cane.