Culinary means related to cooking or the kitchen. When you read about someone's culinary skills, it means their ability to prepare food. A culinary school teaches students how to become professional chefs, training them in everything from knife techniques to flavor combinations.

The word carries a sense of serious, intentional cooking. A culinary adventure might mean trying foods from a culture you've never experienced before, or learning to make a challenging dish like croissants from scratch. Culinary traditions are the special cooking methods and recipes that families or cultures pass down through generations, like your grandmother's technique for making perfect pie crust or the way Italian families prepare Sunday sauce.

You might see culinary used to describe herbs grown specifically for cooking (culinary herbs like basil and thyme, as opposed to decorative plants). Professional cooks sometimes call themselves culinary professionals to emphasize that cooking is their trained expertise, a craft they've developed through study and practice. When something involves cooking as an art or craft, culinary is often the right word to describe it.