Granary

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈɡɹan(ə)ɹi/

Definitions

1. A building or room used for storing threshed grain after harvest
2. A structure designed for preserving harvested grain in bulk storage
3. A facility constructed to contain and protect cereal crops following the threshing process

Etymology: Granary is a near-twin of "garner," and the two arrived in English by different routes. "Garner" came in through Old French from Latin "granarium," meaning a storehouse for grain, and it had been part of English for centuries before the Latin word was borrowed directly in the 16th century. English speakers thus ended up with two forms of one Latin word, a pair linguists call doublets. The Latin "granarium" is itself built from "granum," "grain," with the suffix "-arium," which marks a place connected with something, so the word literally means a place for grain. The older form survived in use as a verb, to garner, meaning to gather and store up, which pushed the noun more toward the fixed building. Granary kept the concrete sense of a barn-like structure, while garner drifted into the figurative sense of collecting or accumulating things such as praise, votes or information.

Synonyms: storehouse, repository