What does currying mean?
Currying is the present participle of the verb 'to curry', and it covers several distinct activities that share a name but little else. In the kitchen, currying simply means preparing food with curry spices or sauce — a practice central to South Asian cuisine and now global in reach. In everyday idiom, 'currying favour' describes ingratiating oneself with someone powerful through flattery, a phrase inherited from the medieval expression 'to curry favel'. In computer science, currying names an elegant technique — after the logician Haskell Curry — in which a function taking several arguments is converted into a series of functions each taking one argument, enabling partial application and reusable code. Finally, in older rural usage, currying referred to grooming a horse with a currycomb. The word's many lives make it a striking example of how unrelated senses can cluster under one spelling.
The act or process of preparing food with curry spices; also, the act of ingratiating oneself with someone (in 'currying favour').
"Currying the lamb slowly over low heat gives the sauce time to thicken."
Most often encountered in the fixed phrase 'currying favour', which implies insincere flattery.
The technique of transforming a function of multiple arguments into a sequence of functions that each take a single argument.
"Currying the addition function allows you to create an incrementer by supplying just one argument."
In computer science, 'currying' functions isn't about food at all — it's named after logician Haskell Curry, and it lets programmers feed arguments to a function one bite at a time.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of currying
As a cooking term, 'curry' entered English in the late sixteenth or seventeenth century from Tamil 'kari', meaning sauce or relish, via Portuguese traders in southern India; 'currying' is simply its verbal form. Separately, the verb 'curry' meaning to groom a horse derives from Old French 'corrier/contraier' ('to arrange or prepare'), related to Latin 'conredare'; the flattering sense grew out of the proverbial phrase 'to curry favel' (favour), recorded from the fourteenth century. The computing sense was introduced in the twentieth century and honours the American mathematician Haskell Curry, though the underlying idea traces back to Moses Schönfinkel.
Related word forms
How currying is actually used
As a culinary gerund, 'currying' is ordinary and unremarkable in register. In the phrase 'currying favour', the word carries distinctly negative connotations of sycophancy and self-interest, so it should be used with care when describing people's motives. The computing sense is technical and appears almost exclusively in programming contexts.
Easily confused with currying
Curing means preserving food by salting, smoking, or drying, whereas currying means flavouring food with curry spices (or in logic, transforming multi-argument functions).
Carrying means transporting something from one place to another, while currying refers to spice-based cooking, flattery, or the function-transformation technique.