DictionaryAI

cupboard

KUB-urd/ˈkʌb.ɚd/SayKUB-uhd/ˈkʌb.əd//ˈkɐb.əd/

Pluralcupboards

Verbcupboards, cupboarding, cupboarded

6 meanings of cupboard

Practice

  1. 1
    nouncountable
    A cabinet or closet fitted with shelves for storing cookware, dishes, or food, and sometimes other household items.

    He reached into the cupboard for a large mixing bowl.

    Their narrow kitchen had cupboards stacked all the way to the ceiling.

    Similarcabinet

    Note

    The enclosed piece was in use early, alongside the open board. John Palsgrave's Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (1530) lists both a cupboard to set plate upon and a "cupborde to putte meate in." By 1874 J. T. Micklethwaite was fitting one with shelves for music books, well beyond the kitchen. The Old Mother Hubbard rhyme, printed in The Satirist in 1814, gives the sense its best-known line: "The cupboard was bare."

  2. 2
    noundialectalPennsylvaniaUKWesterncountable
    A closet or recess used for hanging and storing coats and other outerwear.

    She left her dripping umbrella in the cupboard near the entrance.

    The cupboard under the stairs held coats, scarves, and a row of muddy boots.

    Similarcloset

    Note

    A regional use, found in British English and in Western Pennsylvania. Susie Boyt, writing in the Financial Times in 2023, simply "hung the coat in the cupboard." Outside those areas the phrase may sound odd, because there the word suggests kitchen and dish storage. A cupboard under the stairs or by the front door is the natural British setting for it.

  3. 3
    verbtransitive
    To gather things together and store them away, as if into a cabinet; to hoard.

    Misers cupboard their wealth and spend almost nothing.

    During the shortage, families cupboarded whatever food they could find.

    Similarhoard, stockpile, store, stash

    Note

    A verb made directly from the noun. Its standing case is Shakespeare's Coriolanus (1613), in the fable where the body's members rebel against the belly. They accuse it of lying idle, "still cubbording the Viand": storing food away and never sharing the labor. That sense of idle hoarding is the verb's flavor. It inflects regularly: cupboards, cupboarding, cupboarded.

Less common meanings

  1. 4
    nounobsolete
    A board or table used to openly display silver plate and other valuable dishware; a sideboard or buffet.
    from the cobbarde byſyde owr dyninge table
    1555, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, “The fourth booke of the seconde Decade, of the supposed Continent”
    Cupboꝛde of plate or to ſette plate upon buffet z ma.
    1530, Iohan Palſgrave, “The thirde boke”
    Note

    The original object behind the word: Middle English cuppeborde, literally a cup board, an open board or table where plate stood in view. Sixteenth-century spellings such as cobbarde and cubbard show the p already sounding as b, as it still does. In Sir John Harington's Orlando Furioso (1591) a lamp burns "upon the cubbard." The lamp is on it, not in it, and that preposition is the quickest way to recognize this sense in older texts.

  2. 5
    nounobsolete
    The dishware set out on a sideboard for display, especially valuable plate.
    But howe comme to pas, / Your cupbord that was / Is tourned to glasse, / From syluere to brasse, / From golde to pewter, / Or els to a newter, / To copper, to tyn, / To lede, or alcumyn?
    a. 1529, John Skelton, Why Come Ye Nat to Courte?; published in John Skelton; Alexander Dyce
    Note

    Here the word moves from the furniture to what stood on it, much as "the table" can mean the food. John Skelton's Why Come Ye Nat to Courte? (before 1529) mocks a household whose cupboard "is tourned to glasse, / From syluere to brasse." The plate has been downgraded, not the stand. When older writing values or melts down a cupboard, it means the display collection set out on the open display board.

  3. 6
    nounobsolete
    The items kept stored inside a cupboard, particularly the household's food supplies.
    Note

    Like the displayed plate, this sense names the contents instead of the container, but here the contents are food. The Roxburghe Ballads (around 1665) mock suitors who sigh and pant "all for the love of the cubbard." They love what they can get, a well-stocked larder rather than the person. Read the word this way when an older text treats a cupboard as something one could eat or covet.

Practice

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Origin

Inherited from Middle English cuppeborde or cupbord, equivalent to cup + board. By the 16th century the original /p/ had assimilated to the modern /b/ sound, though the older etymological spelling has dominated since the 18th century.