Juelerye

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Valuable ornaments such as rings, necklaces and brooches worn for decoration, considered together as a group
2. Precious adornments made of gems or metals, especially when regarded as a collection of personal finery
3. Costly decorative objects worn on the body, an archaic term for the trinkets and gems people wore as display

Etymology: Before it meant a collection of ornaments, this word was simply a spelling of "jewelry" that English writers used in the late Middle Ages, when the spelling had not yet settled. It is built from "juel," the older form of "jewel," plus the French-derived suffix "-erie," which marked goods, a trade, or a collective group of things, as in "pottery" or "armoury." The surprise lies in the root of "jewel." It comes from Old French "jouel," which descends from Latin "jocale," meaning a plaything or trinket. That Latin word is linked to "jocus," meaning joke or jest. So a jewel was originally a toy or bauble, something frivolous, before it came to mean a precious gem. Over time, "juelerye" lost its u-spelling and the stress shifted, giving us the modern "jewelry." The older form survives mainly in historical texts, where it shows how English spelling was still working out how to represent French borrowings.