grocer
Americannoun
-
grocers
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of grocer
1325–75; Middle English < Old French gross ( i ) er wholesale merchant. See gross, -er 2
Explanation
Someone who sells food in a supermarket or convenience store is a grocer. If you can't find your favorite kind of cereal on the shelf, you should ask the grocer to help you. The owner or manager of a grocery store is a grocer. This word once meant "one who buys and sells in gross," or in large quantities, from the Anglo-French grosser. By the 16th century, grocer also meant "merchant selling food," but earlier that person would've been called a spicer. Your neighborhood grocer might sell fresh produce from local farmers, unlike that big box supermarket out by the mall.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
“A grocer or retailer running on thin margins cannot build all of that alone, and with AI, the playing field risks being tilted even further away from local commerce.”
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 29, 2026
In the last year, the grocer has opened in West Hollywood, Glendale and Thousand Oaks, with outposts in Costa Mesa and downtown Los Angeles locations planned for 2027.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 22, 2026
Many come in Instagram-friendly packaging and are available at trendy shops like the grocer Erewhon and the K-beauty mecca Olive Young.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 19, 2026
She said the grocer “must turn things around.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 13, 2026
The grocer probably put back the pomegranates and the tea and the saffron, so that someone else could buy them.
From "Everything Sad Is Untrue" by Daniel Nayeri
She says Erewhon pioneered these “hypebeast” grocers, as she calls them.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 6, 2026
He added that "Instacart has spent years learning to do that well for grocers, while DoorDash has built a delivery network and technology that local stores rely on every day".
From BBC ● Oct. 29, 2026
“The biggest online retailers and grocers are racing ahead, building their own delivery fleets, warehouses, membership programs, and AI shopping assistants,” the companies said in their release.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 29, 2026
While some grocers have unveiled expansion plans, others have had to pull back.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 22, 2026
She rarely went out beyond the neighborhood grocers and wasn’t used to such dense crowds.
From "The Red Car to Hollywood" by Jennie Liu
Random Word
Spin the wheel and learn a new word!
Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
