Etymograph

English

cheese

Cheese comes from Middle English chese, and goes back to Latin cāseus.

  1. Latinc. 75 BCE–200 CEcāseus1
  2. Proto-Germanicc. 500 BCE–200 CE*kāsijaz1reconstructed
  3. Proto-West Germanicc. 200–500 CE*kāsī1reconstructed
  4. Old Englishc. 450–1150ċīese1
  5. Middle Englishc. 1150–1500chese1
  6. Englishearliest quotation 1853cheese1

attested reconstructed ? uncertain or disputed deepest recorded ancestor

  1. 1 Wiktionary, English cheese
  2. Earliest quotation in Wiktionary’s entry: 1853, Thomas De Quincey, I Enter the World: “The time was morning; the young lady was not…”.

Lineage

  1. Latinc. 75 BCE–200 CEcāseusWiktionary, English cheese
  2. Proto-Germanicc. 500 BCE–200 CE*kāsijazWiktionary, English cheesereconstructed
  3. Proto-West Germanicc. 200–500 CE*kāsīWiktionary, English cheesereconstructed
  4. Old Englishc. 450–1150ċīeseWiktionary, English cheese
  5. Middle Englishc. 1150–1500cheseWiktionary, English cheese
  6. Englishearliest quotation 1853cheeseWiktionary, English cheese. Earliest quotation in Wiktionary’s entry: 1853, Thomas De Quincey, I Enter the World: “The time was morning; the young lady was not…”

Word family

English words that share an ancestor with cheese, grouped by the ancestor they share, most familiar first.

through Latin cāseus

9 more relatives in the full family tree

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Another origin of cheese

  1. Proto-Iranianprehistoric (reconstructed)*čišreconstructed
  2. Proto-Iranianprehistoric (reconstructed)*čiš-čidreconstructed
  3. Persianc. 900–presentچیزčiz‘thing’
  4. Englishtodaycheese

Though commonly claimed to be a borrowing of Persian چیز (čiz, “thing”), the term does not occur earliest in Anglo-Indian sources, but instead is "well recorded in British and Australian sources from the 1840s onwards".uncertain The source flags this step as uncertain.

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Today it means

noun A dairy product made from curdled or cultured milk.

Sources

Sources: Wiktionary, “cheese”. By Wiktionary contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0, via kaikki.org (dump of Oct 3 2026); text adapted and restructured. Language periods are conventional ranges, not dates for this word. License.

Etymograph / Latin cāseus / cheese