nursery

A British term for what American readers usually call daycare. Like school, it often takes no article: a child attends nursery, starts nursery, or is at nursery. Crèche, nursery school and preschool are its near neighbors, and in British speech the bare word nursery is the everyday choice when parents talk about where a small child spends the working day.

The household room keeps the word's origin in plain view: Middle English noricerie came from Old French norrice, a nurse or wet nurse, plus the noun-forming suffix -erie. In Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (1869), a mother leaves the drawing-room and goes "up to the nursery." In a large house the room was set apart from the adult rooms and given over to children and those who tended them.

The horticultural sense has produced its own vocabulary. Nurseryman, for the grower, already appears in John Beale's letter of 1677, and the trade still speaks of nursery stock and nursery plants. The range runs from growing young plants for transplanting to the retail garden center. An older, now obsolete use applied the word to a plantation of young trees.

Biologists and farmers share this word, and the difference lies in who does the rearing. A natural nursery is a habitat where young animals grow up, such as the mangroves that shelter juvenile fish. An artificial one is built and tended, like a breeder's heated pen or a farm's rearing shed. The animals are usually named alongside the word: a nursery for young fish, a calf nursery.

Sports writing uses it for a feeder: the school, club or academy that develops young players whom bigger teams will later field. It is usually qualified by the sport or by the side it supplies, as in a nursery for the national team. It is a narrowing of the figurative place of growth to athletic talent.

The figure is an old one. In The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare calls Padua "nursery of Arts." Francis Lenton in 1629 condemned plays as "the nurseries of vice." The usual frame is a nursery of something, and it serves praise and blame equally well. Modern writers often put the field in front instead: Tracey Wickham's Treading Water (2010) calls Nudgee College "the greatest rugby nursery in Queensland."

Where the place of growth can foster anything, this use typically produces people: commerce is "the nursery of seamen." Daniel Burston in 1662 pairs it with seminary, describing the Apostles' chosen companions as "a kind of seminary, or nursery of Apostles." Religious writing liked the image. Joshua Lacy Wilson's 1822 sermon calls Christian families "the nurseries of the church on earth."

In the Philippines the word names a stage of schooling, not a place: the first year of preschool. A child is in nursery much as an older child is in first grade. Elsewhere, the British daycare sense names an institution a child attends. The Philippine use names a year the child passes through.

Billiards shortens the compound to its first word, so a nursery is a nursery cannon: a carom played when the balls lie very close together. The clipped form behaves like any countable shot noun, taking a plural and an article. A player strokes in a nursery, or plays a run of nurseries, while the balls stay bunched.