Word of the Day

: October 22, 2014

turophile

noun TOOR-uh-fyle

What It Means

: a connoisseur of cheese : a cheese fancier

turophile in Context

Surely the turophiles at our table can recommend some good cheeses to pair with our wine selection.

"For this dish you need a special cheese from Switzerland called Raclette. It's expensive and hard to find where I live, and it smells terrible-or, to turophiles like me, divine." - Patty Kirk, Starting From Scratch: Memoirs of a Wandering Cook, 2008

Did You Know?

Are you stuck on Stilton or gaga for Gouda? Do you crave Camembert? If so, you just might be a turophile, the ultimate cheese lover. From an irregular formation of the Greek word for cheese, tyros, plus the English -phile, meaning "lover" (itself a descendant of the Greek -philos, meaning "loving"), turophile first named cheese aficionados as early as 1938. It was in the 1950s, however, that the term really caught the attention of the American public, when Clifton Fadiman (writer, editor, and radio host) introduced turophile to readers of his eloquent musings on the subject of cheese.