COOKED FLESH SHOP

The word charcuterie (meaning "meat delicatessen") was borrowed in the mid-nineteenth century from French charcuterie, which at the time mainly meant "pork-butcher's shop". More literally, it meant "cooked flesh shop", because it comes from the obsolete word char, meaning "flesh"; cuit, the past participle of cuire, "to cook"; and the suffix -erie, which is used to denote places that sell things. Char comes from Latin carnem, also meaning "flesh" (we see this in words like carnivore, carnage, and carnival), and that, through Proto-Italic karo, traces to Proto-Indo-European sker, meaning "piece" or "portion". Cuire, meanwhile, comes from Latin coquere, which also meant "to cook" (and is the source of words like concoct, cuisine, and culinary) and ultimately traces to PIE.