calorie

The word “calorie” means a unit of food energy (technically a kilocalorie) used on nutrition labels to measure how much energy a food provides. In plain terms, a measure of energy — in everyday use, it tells you how much energy a food will give your body.

“Calorie” is pronounced KA-luh-ree (/ˈkæləɹi/ in IPA).

Here is “calorie” used in a sentence: “The bar has 250 calories per serving.”

“Calorie” is a noun.

The word “calorie” comes from Latin. Borrowed from French calorie, built on Latin calor ("heat").

“Calorie” is an uncommon word in modern English, usually learned at around the C1 level.

“Calorie” has 2 distinct senses listed in this dictionary. The most common is: a unit of food energy (technically a kilocalorie) used on nutrition labels to measure how much energy a food provides.

The unit used on nutrition labels is technically a kilocalorie, equal to 1,000 of the small scientific calories originally defined as the energy needed to raise one gram of water by one degree Celsius. In everyday nutrition talk, "calorie" is used loosely to mean kilocalorie, which is why food labels show much larger numbers than the strict scientific unit would suggest.

A capital-C Calorie is used in nutrition contexts to signal that the figure refers to a kilocalorie rather than the smaller scientific calorie, helping distinguish food energy values from the technical unit of heat. In practice, most food labeling drops the capital and just says "calories," even though it means kilocalories.

The joule is the modern scientific unit of energy that has largely replaced the calorie in physics and chemistry, since both measure energy but the calorie was defined specifically around heating water. Nutrition labels in many countries now list both calories and kilojoules so the food energy can be understood in either unit.