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PlainSpell

foodie

/ˈfuːdi/noun

foodie is a noun meaning “A person with a special interest in or knowledge of food, a gourmet” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-O-O-D-I-E and has 2 syllables, and it appears 1.1 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of foodie is foodies.

What does foodie mean?

noun

  1. 1

    colloquialA person with a special interest in or knowledge of food, a gourmet.

    We self-professed foodies liked to meet in restaurants and talk like experts about what we were eating.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce foodie?

  • /ˈfuːdi/

Foodie has 2 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-au-foodie.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of foodie

  • foodies plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is foodie?

Foodie appears 1.1 times per million words in written English, the 26,776th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Foodie in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense person with special interest in food:

LanguageWords
Frenchcuisinomane, foodie
GermanFoodie
Portugueseesfomeado
Spanishfoodie (fudi), foody (fudi), comidista

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does foodie come from?

From food + -ie. Popularized by Ann Barr and Paul Levy in The Official Foodie Handbook (1984). Levy credits New York food critic Gael Greene with the coinage. The word was used by Greene in a 1980 article in New York magazine, see quotations.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).