granola

English

Granola

Etymology

By 1967, American English, probably from Italian grano (“grain”) or granular, with commercial suffix -ola.

Earlier, with a capital G-, it was a proprietary name for a kind of breakfast cereal, registered in 1886 by Will Keith Kellogg and in use into the early 20th century. It was initially known as Granula and renamed Granola to avoid legal problems with James Caleb Jackson, who invented a similar cereal in 1863, named Granula after the granules of Graham flour, the main ingredient. The food and name were revived in the 1960s.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ɡɹəˈnoʊlə/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -əʊlə

Noun

granola (countable and uncountable, plural granolas)

1. A breakfast and snack food consisting of loose, crispy pellets made of nuts, rolled oats, honey and other natural ingredients.
2. (slang, countable) Short for crunchy granola.

Derived terms

• crunchy granola
• granola bar
• granola-head
• granola mom

Translations

breakfast and snack food

• Arabic: جرانولا f (jirnula)
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: please add this translation if you can

• Czech: müsli (cs), cereálie f pl
• Dutch: muesli (nl) m, crunchy m
• Esperanto: granolo
• Finnish: mysli (fi)
• French: granola (fr) m
• German: Müsli (de) n
• Hungarian: müzli (hu)
• Japanese: グラノーラ (guranōra)
• Korean: 그래놀라 (geuraenolla)
• Polish: granola (pl) f
• Russian: гранола (ru) f (granola)
• Spanish: granola (es) f

Adjective

granola (comparative more granola, superlative most granola)

1. (chiefly Canada, US, of a person) Eating healthy food, supporting the protection of the environment, and having liberal views.

   You see more and more of the granola hippie activist types these days.

   • 2013 November 21, Jame Schaefer, Tobias Winright, Environmental Justice and Climate Change‎^[1], page 228:

     […] behind them a granola-looking mom in denim overalls and a t-shirt was pulling in to do her drop-off . . . from a Prius.

   • 2015 February 13, Dennis Saffran, “The Orwellian Campaign To Project Anti-Vaccination Onto Republicans”, in The Federalist:

     Rather, the anti-vax movement is almost entirely a phenomenon of the affluent crunchy granola Left—as everyone across the political spectrum acknowledged until the last week or so.

   • 2020 June 18, Kiera Butler, “The Anti-Vax Movement’s Radical Shift From Crunchy Granola Purists to Far-Right Crusaders”, in Mother Jones:

     Yet some experts believe that voices from the far right are beginning to drown out those of the crunchy granola crowd.

Anagrams

• Angolar, angolar, organal

French

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɡʁa.no.la/

Noun

granola m (plural granolas)

1. granola

Derived terms

• grano

Spanish

Noun

granola f (plural granolas)

1. granola

Further reading

• “granola”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.8, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 2024 December 10