Crockery is dishes and plates made from baked clay, the kind of everyday tableware you eat from at home. The term covers plates, bowls, cups, and saucers, especially the sturdy ceramic kind that can handle being used every day, washed in hot water, and stacked in cupboards.

For thousands of years, people have shaped clay into useful vessels, then fired them in hot ovens called kilns to make them hard and waterproof. Your grandmother's matching dinner plates, the bowl you eat cereal from, the mug that holds hot chocolate: that's all crockery.

Crockery is tougher than it looks. Drop a ceramic plate and it might shatter, but properly made crockery can last for generations. Some families pass down special sets of crockery for decades. Museums display ancient crockery from civilizations that disappeared thousands of years ago, proof that a well-made clay bowl can outlast the people who ate from it.

The word sounds old-fashioned because people today often say “dishes” instead, but crockery remains the proper term, especially in British English, for the ceramic plates and bowls that make a table ready for a meal.