Napa

How to spell napa

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce napa

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does napa mean?

1. nounA type of Chinese cabbage with pale, tightly packed, crinkled leaves, used in salads and stir-fries.

Napa in a sentence

• The recipe calls for a head of napa cabbage thinly sliced.

• She shredded the napa and tossed it with sesame dressing.

Where does napa come from?

Language of origin: Japanese

As the name of the crinkled, pale Chinese cabbage, napa comes from the Japanese word nappa, written with characters meaning the leaves or greens of a vegetable. In Japanese cooking nappa broadly described edible leafy greens, and the term travelled into English kitchens during the twentieth century as East Asian produce became common in Western markets. English shortened and respelled the Japanese double consonant to a single one, giving the modern napa, which is why the cabbage is also simply called napa cabbage. A separate and unrelated napa, the soft full-grain leather, takes its name instead from the town of Napa in California, where it was first tanned, so the two senses are pure coincidence of spelling. Because the everyday spelling is so short and phonetic, the main trap is simply remembering the single p rather than the doubled pp some writers expect from the Japanese form.

How the word is built

• napa (a single unanalysable root; from Japanese nappa 'leafy greens')