Meaning & use
comfit
Last updated
UK/ˈkʌmfɪt/
US/ˈkʌmfɪt/
Meaning
nouncountablearchaic
A small sweet made of a nut, seed or piece of fruit coated in hard sugar.
Grammar: Plural comfits: a dish of comfits.
Patterns
- a dish of comfits
The children were handed a paper cone of colored comfits.
In old recipes a comfit was often an almond coated in sugar.
She decorated the cake with pink comfits.
Word forms
| plural | comfits |
|---|
Common combinations
- sugared comfits
- A dish of sugared comfits sat on the table.
- caraway comfits
- Caraway comfits were once eaten after dinner.
- box of comfits
- He gave her a box of comfits as a gift.
- scatter comfits
- They scattered comfits over the pudding.
Synonyms and how they differ
- sweet
- Sweet is the general modern word for candy, while comfit is a particular old type with a hard sugar coat.
- bonbon
- Bonbon is a more elegant modern candy often with a soft center, whereas comfit has a hard sugar shell.
- dragée
- Dragée is a close modern word for a sugar-coated almond or cake decoration, and it sounds more French.
- candy
- Candy is the everyday American word for any sweet, while comfit sounds historical.
Word family
- confection noun
- a sweet dish or treat
- confectioner noun
- a person who makes sweets
- confit noun
- meat cooked slowly in its own fat, a different word
Commonly confused: comfit or confit? comfit or comfy?
comfit vs confit
Confit is a French cooking method of slow-cooking meat in fat. A comfit is a sugar sweet.
comfit vs comfy
Comfy is informal for comfortable, and unrelated to comfit.
Practice
In a Tudor recipe, what would you do with a comfit?
Choose one answer.
A comfit is a small sugar-coated sweet, so you eat it. The other options use it as a non-food object.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “comfit”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.
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