Russian Word of the Day

I've been on a cooking spree the last few months, and yesterday I made iced ginger elixir from p. 503 of The Garden of Eating. To my disgust I realized that I didn't know the word for ginger in any language but English. The situation was not to be tolerated! It turns out that the Russian word for it is имбирь (masc.) “I made ginger tea” = «Я сделал себе чай из имбиря.»

Имбирь is an end-stressed noun, which means that if the noun has a grammatical ending that contains one or two vowels, the stress is on the first vowel of the grammatical ending; other wise the nouns stressed on the last vowel of the word. In this case it works like this:

Well, theoretically at least that's how the word works. In fact имбирь, just like many spice words in English, usually isn't used in the plural. Can you imagine someone in English saying, "We sell cinnamons" in the sense of "We sell various types of cinnamon"? Sure, we can understand the meaning right away, and perhaps professional spice sellers might say such a thing, but an ordinary person uses the word only in the singular.

Adjective: имбирный