Paste

How to spell paste

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce paste

What does paste mean?

1. nounA soft, moist, thick mixture that can be spread or moulded.
2. verbTo stick or fasten something using a moist adhesive.
3. verbTo insert copied or cut text or data into a document or field.

Paste in a sentence

• noun

  She mixed the flour and water into a smooth paste.

• verb

  She wanted to paste the photographs into the album by hand.

• verb

  He copied the figures from the spreadsheet and chose to paste them into the report.

• noun

  A thin layer of wallpaper paste held the strips firmly to the wall.

• verb

  Workers began to paste the new posters over the old ones.

• verb

  Select the address, then paste it into the search bar.

Where does paste come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Paste comes from the Late Latin pasta, which meant a kind of dough or a small square of barley porridge, and that Latin word was itself borrowed from the Greek pastē, meaning a sprinkled mixture of barley and sauce, from passein 'to sprinkle'. The sense narrowed over time to mean any soft, moist, mouldable mixture, especially flour and water used to stick things together. English took the word in around the 1300s through Old French paste, which is why the modern spelling keeps the silent final 'e' rather than the Italian form. That very same Latin pasta gave English the food word 'pasta' as a direct later borrowing, so paste and pasta are close cousins from one dough-shaped ancestor. In the twentieth century the verb gained a new computing sense, inserting copied text or data, echoing the old idea of fixing something into place.

How the word is built

• paste (single root from Late Latin pasta: dough, paste); no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like paste

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• paced: Walked back and forth with steady, measured steps, often out of worry or impatience.