Lasagna

How to spell lasagna

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce lasagna

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lasagna mean?

1. nounA baked Italian dish of flat pasta sheets layered with sauce, cheese, and usually meat.

Lasagna in a sentence

• He layered the lasagna with rich tomato sauce and three cheeses.

• The freezer was full of homemade lasagna in foil trays.

Where does lasagna come from?

Language of origin: Italian

The word comes from Italian, where lasagna names a wide flat sheet of pasta and, by extension, the layered baked dish built from those sheets. The Italians took it from the Latin lasanum, which meant a cooking pot or vessel, so the original idea was the container rather than the food cooked in it. Latin in turn borrowed the term from the Greek lasanon, a word that referred to a trivet or stand for a pot, and in some uses even a chamber pot, a surprisingly earthy ancestor for such a comforting meal. English adopted the term in the twentieth century as Italian cooking spread, and writers see two endings in the wild: the singular lasagna and the plural lasagne. The single sheet is one lasagna, several are lasagne, which is exactly why the final vowel is the spelling trap; the dish came to English through Italian, not through a Latinate -ne pattern, so the soft gn sound hides the silent path of those letters.

How the word is built

• lasagna (Italian singular of lasagne, the flat pasta sheets and the baked dish made from them)