Brie is a soft French cheese made from cow’s milk. The inside is pale and creamy, almost thick enough to spread; the outside has a thin white skin that you can eat. When it is ready it smells stronger than it looks, and it can run a little if the room is warm. The cheese is named after Brie, a region east of Paris, where people have made this kind of cheese for a very long time. In English we usually say brie for the cheese (often with a small b), though you will also see Brie. It sits next to camembert in shops: they look alike, but brie is often a bit milder and comes as a larger, flatter wheel. You meet the word in food shops, on menus, and when people put together a cheese board. It is not slang and not fancy English; it is just the name of the cheese. People say it as one syllable, like “bree”, not “bry-ee”.