scullery

American  

[skuhl-uh-ree, skuhl-ree] / ˈskʌl ə ri, ˈskʌl ri /

noun

Chiefly British.

• sculleries
  plural

1. a small room or section of a pantry in which food is cleaned, trimmed, and cut into cooking portions before being sent to the kitchen.

2. a small room or section of a pantry or kitchen in which cooking utensils are cleaned and stored.

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scullery British  

/ ˈskʌlərɪ /

noun

1. a small room or part of a kitchen where washing up, vegetable preparation, etc is done

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• sculleries
  plural

Etymology

Origin of scullery

1300–50; Middle English squillerye < Middle French escuelerie, equivalent to escuele dish (< Latin scutella, diminutive of scutra pan) + -rie -ry

Explanation

You're most likely to see the word scullery in an English novel, since it's a small room off the kitchen, usually in a very old, very British home. In the old days, maids cleaned dishes and utensils — and sometimes clothing — in the scullery, out of sight of their wealthy employers. In some parts of Britain, the word scullery is still used to mean "kitchen," although few people would claim to employ a "scullery maid," or a low-ranking member of a household staff. The root of the word is in doubt, but it probably comes from the Latin word for wooden platter, scutra, or the Old Norse skola, "to wash."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

scullery sculleries

"It'd be nice for me to do something completely different. I'd love to do a comedy or I'd like to be a scullery maid in the kitchens in a period drama."

From BBC ● Mar. 2, 2026

Dunk and Egg’s camaraderie fits the same tradition, proposing scullery maids can become queens.

From Salon ● Feb. 23, 2026

Back kitchens come with as many names as they do appliances: the dirty kitchen, the messy kitchen, the prep kitchen, the working kitchen and the scullery kitchen, to name a few.

From Seattle Times ● Sep. 26, 2022

An unwelcome playboy courts the scullery maid who works for his girlfriend’s father.

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 27, 2020

The Princess Eilonwy hurried from the scullery, her apron flying and a cookpot still in her hand.

From "The Black Cauldron" by Lloyd Alexander

For the first time, some of the men who had toiled anonymously in the palace sculleries stepped into the throne room.

From Time Magazine Archive

The hall is connected with an ample kitchen, and a series of butteries, pantries, and sculleries of suitable size.

From Holborn and Bloomsbury The Fascination of London by Sir Walter Besant

It contained numerous little ante-rooms, garrets, closets, and box-rooms, little landings with balustrades, little statues on carved wooden pillars, and all kinds of back passages and sculleries.

From Virgin Soil by R. S. Townsend

Will a water tap run in your sculleries, if there is no pipe that joins it with the source of supply?

From Expositions of Holy Scripture: the Acts by Alexander Maclaren

He next went into the kitchen and the sculleries and locked the outer doors in that quarter.

From The Lion's Share by Arnold Bennett

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