The other day, I encountered a word I had never seen before:
Pasteries
I quickly checked Google and saw that it actually had over 300,000 search results!
After reviewing a few of the listed sites, I realized that by pasteries, the author meant pastries, those yummy, sweet, buttery, flaky goodies you find at your local bakery.
As I mentioned, I’d never seen that spelling before, so I did a bit of sleuthing. Even though Google wanted to me to search for pastries instead, pasteries seems to be a fairly popular spelling of the word.
In the Google ngram above, we see that until the early 20th century, pasteries was uncommon, but in the 1920s, it started to take off until the 1940s, when it took a nosedive. It saw a resurgence in the 1970s, then dropped again in the 1980s. It hasn’t recovered since.
Interestingly enough, pastries had a similar ebb and flow in popularity, rising until the 1940s, dropping, then rising again starting in the 1970s (see below). Of course, unlike pasteries, this spelling continued rising in popularity since then.
The pasteries spelling isn’t even new; I found an instance of it going back to the 18th century — 1778, to be exact. Here’s a quote from page 221 in 10th volume of Dramatick Works of Beaumont and Fletcher. This is the beginning of scene 2 of the play “The Woman Hater”, and the character Lazarillo is speaking:
Go, run, search, pry in every nook and angle
O’th’ kitchens, larders, and pasteries
Know what meat’s boil’d, bak’d, roast, stew’d, fried, or sous’d,
At this dinner, to be serv’d directly, or indirectly
Another intriguing tidbit is that pastry — and pastery by association — comes from the word paste, which was a French word that used to mean dough (similar to the Italian pasta). In a way, pastery makes sense as a spelling.
So, when I comes across the pasteries spelling in the future, I’ll think twice before correcting it. If you decide to use it, be aware that your spellchecker won’t recognize it, and probably your copyeditor won’t either.
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