Pastry

How to spell pastry

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pastry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pastry mean?

1. nounA dough of flour, fat, and water used as a base for baking, or a sweet baked item made from it.

Pastry in a sentence

• She rolled the pastry thin before lining the pie dish.

• The bakery sells a fresh pastry with almond filling every morning.

Where does pastry come from?

Language of origin: French

Pastry is built on the older English word 'paste', meaning a soft, workable dough, which English took from Old French 'paste'. That French word descended from the Late Latin 'pasta', meaning a paste or dough of flour, and ultimately from a Greek word 'pasta' that referred to a kind of barley porridge or sprinkled, salted dish. The ending '-ry' was added to mean a body or class of such goods, so 'pastry' originally meant baked items made from this paste. The word is recorded in English from the early 1500s. Its Latin ancestor 'pasta' is the very same source of the modern food 'pasta', which is why both pastry and pasta share that dough-related root; remembering 'paste' inside the word also explains why it is spelled 'past' rather than 'pase'.

How the word is built

• past- (from paste: a soft dough)
• -ry (noun suffix denoting a class of goods)