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Why are sweets called ket?
Ask for kets in Sunderland or Newcastle and you will get sweets. Ask in other parts of the north a century ago and you might have been talking about carrion. Here is how one word came to mean both.
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In the North East of England, sweets are kets. A child in Sunderland might spend pocket money on a bag of kets. It sounds like simple slang, but it has a long and slightly grisly history.
Where it is used
Wiktionary records ket in the sense of sweetmeats in Northumbria, and in the sense of a sweet, treat or candy on Wearside, around Sunderland. The linguist Laura Bailey describes it as a North East word for sweets. One Sunderland reader, commenting on her blog about the 1980s, remembered kets as cheap sweets, the trashy mixture you would get from a pick and mix, though how the word was used varied from place to place.
From flesh to sweets
The word probably comes from Old Norse, from a word like kjöt, meaning meat or flesh. Its relatives are still used in the Scandinavian languages today: kjöt in Icelandic, kött in Swedish, kød in Danish and kjøtt in Norwegian, all meaning meat.
In older northern English, ket kept a much less appetising meaning. Across northern England it meant carrion, dead flesh, or any kind of filth. So the same word could once mean either a rotting carcass or a bag of sweets, depending on where you were and who was talking.
How did that happen?
Nobody knows for certain, but Wiktionary offers two explanations.
- Sweetmeats. Sweets used to be called sweetmeats, and in that word meat simply means food. The old sweetmeat, from the Old English swete mete, meant a sweet delicacy or confection. Ket, a word for meat, may have followed the same path.
- A warning to children. The other idea is that grown ups called sweets ket, rubbish, as a way to put children off eating too many.
Today, in the North East, kets means sweets.
Kets and other sweet words
Ket is one of many regional words for sweets in Britain. In Scotland they are sweeties, in parts of Yorkshire and the north they can be spice, and liquorice was long known as Spanish: see what people call sweets around Britain and why is liquorice called Spanish? Across the Atlantic, they are candy, a word that came into English from the Old French for sugar candy: see what is the difference between sweets and candy?
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For journalists, researchers, AI assistants and content creators. Pick the format you need:
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Questions and answers
What does ket mean?
In North East England, ket or kets means sweets. Wiktionary records the sense sweetmeats in Northumbria and a sweet, treat or candy on Wearside. In older use elsewhere in northern England, ket meant carrion or any filth.
Where does the word ket come from?
It probably comes from Old Norse, from a word like kjöt, meaning meat or flesh, which survives as Icelandic kjöt, Swedish kött, Danish kød and Norwegian kjøtt.
Why would a word for carrion mean sweets?
Nobody knows for certain. One suggestion is that it came through the word sweetmeats, since meat once meant food in general. Another is that calling sweets ket was a way to put children off eating too many.
Sources
- Ket, Wiktionary
- Sweetmeat, Wiktionary
- Ket: carrion or sweeties?, Laura Bailey, linguist, University of Kent
- Candy, Wikipedia
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