How to pronounce caramel

Short answer: Americans say it two ways, both correct: CARE-uh-mel, with three syllables (/ˈkɛrəˌmɛl/), or CAR-mul, with two (/ˈkɑrməl/). Merriam-Webster lists CAR-mul first; American Heritage, Dictionary.com and Oxford put three syllables first. For British English, Cambridge, Oxford Learner's Dictionaries and Collins give only three: KA-ruh-mul or KA-ruh-mel (/ˈkærəməl/, /ˈkærəmel/), with the A of cat. The French original, caramel, is kah-rah-MEL.

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Is it caramel or carmel?

Here's what dictionaries list:

In the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project run online by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder in 2002–2003, Americans split almost evenly. Of 11,609 people, 38.02% said two syllables, 37.66% said three and 17.26% said they use both.

Josh Katz, then a PhD student at North Carolina State University, mapped those answers in 2013: CAR-mul dominates the Midwest, the Great Plains and most of the West, three syllables the Southeast and New England. His New York Times dialect quiz later that year (over 350,000 new responses) asked about caramel too, and its map shows the same split.

Two national polls for candy brands, by Ipsos for Werther's Original (2017, over 1,000 adults) and The Harris Poll for HI-CHEW (2018, over 2,000 adults), both found 57% using three syllables. In the Werther's poll, only the Midwest preferred two, 57% to 43%.

And Carmel? Without the middle A, it's a place name: Mount Carmel in Israel and several US towns. Carmel, Indiana, is CAR-mul; Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, is car-MEL. On National Caramel Day 2017, the Indiana city's mayor, Jim Brainard, renamed it Caramel for a day and joked about "that little town out in California that says it wrong."

Our advice: both are correct, so match the people around you. If you're unsure or learning English, use three syllables: it follows the spelling, it's the only British form, and it won both polls. Grew up saying CAR-mul? Keep it; Merriam-Webster lists it first.

Why is caramel pronounced two different ways?

The spelling has three syllables, but English can drop a weak vowel inside a word, as in camera (KAM-ruh); linguists call it syncope. Drop the A from car-a-mel and the R lands right before a consonant, where English long ago turned "arr" into the "ar" of car: CAR-mul.

Dictionaries came around slowly: Webster's Second (1934) gave only three syllables, and Webster's Third (1961) added CAR-mul with a ÷ sign marking it questionable to some, linguist Edwin Battistella notes on the Oxford University Press blog.

English borrowed the word from French; Merriam-Webster dates its first known use to 1702. French took it from Spanish caramelo, which came from Portuguese, where caramelo can also mean "icicle". The root is Late Latin calamellus, "little reed", and Dictionary.com says the meaning was colored by Medieval Latin cannamella, "sugarcane".

How to say caramel step by step

1. Start with "care" or "ka". If Mary, merry and marry all sound the same to you, as they did for 56.88% of Harvard survey respondents, say care. If your marry has the A of cat, as in New York, Philadelphia or Britain, use that A.
2. Add a weak "uh" and an English R, with your tongue not touching the roof of your mouth: CARE-uh.
3. End with "mel" or "mul", keeping the stress on the first syllable: CARE-uh-mel.
4. For two syllables, say car and go straight to "mul": CAR-mul.

Watch the stress: French caramel, German Karamell and Russian karamel stress the last syllable, and Spanish caramelo and Italian caramello stress the me. English stresses the first and shrinks the middle vowel to "uh".

Practice in a sentence

• Can I get the salted caramel latte, please?
• We stopped in Carmel, Indiana, for caramel corn.
• Heat the sugar slowly until it turns into caramel.

Other words that lose a middle syllable, with American pronunciations from the Cambridge Dictionary:

The Harvard survey also asked about aunt, crayon and pecan. For another French dessert, see macaron; for more squashed syllables, our 60 hard words to pronounce.

What is caramel?

Caramel is sugar heated slowly to about 170 °C (340 °F), until it browns and tastes nutty, buttery or slightly bitter. With cream it becomes caramel sauce; cooked with milk and butter, chewy caramels. Milton Hershey made caramels before chocolate: he started the Lancaster Caramel Company in 1886 and sold it in 1900 for $1 million. Salted caramel is a specialty of Brittany, where Henri Le Roux created his salted-butter caramel in 1977.

Sources

• Merriam-Webster — caramel; Cambridge Dictionary — caramel; Oxford Learner's Dictionaries — caramel
• Dictionary.com — caramel and Carmel; American Heritage — caramel; Collins — caramel
• Wiktionary — caramel, carmel, caramelo, Karamell, карамель and caramello
• Harvard Dialect Survey — caramel and Mary, merry, marry (archived); Business Insider — Josh Katz's maps, 2013; The New York Times — dialect quiz, 2013 (archived)
• Werther's Original — caramel survey, 2017 (archived); HI-CHEW — Harris Poll, 2018; Current in Carmel — National Caramel Day, 2017 (archived)
• OUPblog — The not-so-great caramel debate, Edwin L. Battistella, 2022
• Wikipedia — Caramel, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Carmel, Indiana, vowels before R, syncope; Hershey Community Archives — Lancaster Caramel Company