Lettuce

How to spell lettuce

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lettuce

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lettuce mean?

1. nounA leafy green vegetable with crisp leaves, eaten raw in salads and sandwiches.

Lettuce in a sentence

• She rinsed the lettuce before tossing the salad.

• The sandwich came with tomato, cheese, and a layer of lettuce.

Where does lettuce come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Lettuce comes from the Latin word lactuca, the Roman name for the plant, which was built directly on lac, meaning 'milk'. The Romans named it for the milky white sap that oozes from the stems and leaves when the plant is cut, a feature you can still see in garden lettuces today. The Latin lactuca passed into Old French as laitue, and English borrowed the plural form laitues during the 1200s and 1300s, which is part of why the spelling drifted toward the unusual ending we now write as '-uce'. The same lac root for 'milk' sits inside familiar words such as 'lactose' and 'lactate', which is a useful memory hook: lettuce is literally the milky plant. The tricky part of the spelling is that the ending sounds like a plain '-iss' yet is written '-uce', and the doubled 't' in the middle catches people who write it the way they say it.

How the word is built

• lettuc- (from Latin lactuca, milk-plant)
• -e (final silent vowel)