Pastel

How to spell pastel

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pastel

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pastel mean?

1. adjectivePale and soft in colour or shade.
2. nounA coloured crayon of ground pigment bound into a stick, or a drawing made with such crayons.

Pastel in a sentence

• adjective

  The nursery was painted in a calm pastel blue.

• noun

  The artist smudged the pastel with her fingertip to soften the sky.

• adjective

  She chose a pastel pink dress for the spring wedding.

• noun

  He framed a delicate pastel of the harbour at dawn.

Where does pastel come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English from French pastel, which the French had themselves borrowed from the Italian pastello. The Italian form was a diminutive of pasta, meaning 'paste' or 'dough', because the original artist's pastels were made by binding ground coloured pigment with a gum into a small paste and then rolling it into a stick. The deeper root is the Late Latin pasta, a word for a paste of barley meal that also lies behind the modern word 'pasta' on the dinner table. English adopted pastel in the late 1600s for the chalky drawing crayon, and over time the soft, muted tints those crayons produced gave rise to the adjective meaning 'pale and gentle in colour'. The single -l ending is the spelling trap: although it sounds like a full syllable, there is no double consonant and no -le, just a plain -el inherited straight from the French.

How the word is built

• past- (from Latin pasta: paste)
• -el (diminutive suffix, via Italian -ello and French -el)