Select the correctly spelt word to fill in the blank. All the chefs in the world are famous because of their _____________ skills.

Correct — D. The blank needs the adjective for cooking, and culinary is the only real English word among the four.

The spelling is fixed by the root: Latin culina, "kitchen". That gives the opening c and the first vowel u, and those are the two letters every wrong option attacks — c to k, u to o, or both at once.

Chefs are famous for their culinary skills: option (d).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  colinary — colinary keeps the correct c but swaps the first vowel to o. The root is culina, so the vowel is u, and colinary is not a word.
• (b)
  kolinary — kolinary is wrong twice — k for c and o for u. English took this word from Latin, whose alphabet did not supply the k here.
• (c)
  kulinary — kulinary has the right vowel but opens with k. English spells the borrowing with c, so the sound /k/ at the front does not settle the letter.

A spelling item is decided before you read the options if you can name the root.

Here every distractor varies the same two positions, because that is where the word is phonetically ambiguous: /k/ can be written c or k, and the unstressed first vowel can be heard as u or o.

Sounding the word out therefore cannot decide it. Culina, "kitchen" can, and it also explains the meaning: culinary is anything to do with cooking or the kitchen.

Key facts

• Culinary means relating to cooking or to the kitchen.
• It comes from Latin culina, "kitchen", which fixes the c-u opening.
• colinary, kolinary and kulinary are not English words.

Common traps

• Sounding the word out, when the sound is exactly what the distractors exploit.
• Picking kulinary because the vowel looks right and the k feels phonetic.
• Slowing down over -ary against -ery, which is not what this item varies.

No directly related past PYQ was found.