Pasta
nounA food made from a dough of wheat flour and water, shaped and dried into forms such as spaghetti or penne, then boiled.
How to spell pasta
5 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce pasta
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does pasta mean?
- nounA food made from a dough of wheat flour and water, shaped and dried into forms such as spaghetti or penne, then boiled.
Pasta in a sentence
-
She boiled the pasta for exactly nine minutes.
-
The recipe pairs pasta with a simple tomato sauce.
Where does pasta come from?
Language of origin: Italian
The word comes directly from Italian pasta, meaning 'dough' or 'paste', and English adopted it in the nineteenth century as the cuisine spread beyond Italy. The Italian word itself descends from the Late Latin pasta, meaning a small square of dough or a kind of barley porridge, which in turn was borrowed from the Greek paste, meaning a barley porridge or sauce mixed from flour. At the root sits the Greek verb passein, 'to sprinkle', referring to sprinkling flour or salt into a mixture. The very same Latin pasta is the ancestor of the ordinary English word 'paste', so dough you spread and dough you boil share one origin. Because the spelling is borrowed wholesale from Italian and kept its plain, phonetic shape, it gives modern writers very little trouble.
How the word is built
- pasta (Italian: dough, paste)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.