Ketchup

How to spell ketchup

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ketchup

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ketchup mean?

1. nounA thick, sweet and tangy sauce, usually made from tomatoes, served as a condiment.

Ketchup in a sentence

• He squeezed a generous blob of ketchup onto his fries.

• The diner kept a bottle of ketchup on every table.

Where does ketchup come from?

Language of origin: Chinese

Ketchup almost certainly traces back to a fermented fish sauce of southern coastal China, where the Hokkien Chinese phrase often written as 'ke-tsiap' described a brine or sauce made from pickled fish. The word seems to have travelled through Malay, where 'kecap' (sometimes 'kicap') named a fermented sauce, and English sailors and traders picked it up in the late 1600s. Early English ketchups were nothing like the modern condiment: recipes called for mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, or anchovies, and the tomato version that now dominates only became standard in the nineteenth century, especially in America. Because the word was borrowed by ear rather than from a written root, its spelling has never fully settled, and the rival forms 'catsup' and 'catchup' both circulated for centuries. That unstable, sound-based history is exactly why the modern speller has to simply memorise the 'k', the silent-looking 'tch', and the schwa in the final '-up'. The origin is genuinely debated by scholars, so the precise chain of borrowing should be treated with some caution.

How the word is built

• Unanalysable loanword; no native prefix or suffix (treated as a single root borrowed whole into English)