Pea

How to spell pea

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pea

What does pea mean?

1. nounA small round green seed eaten as a vegetable, grown in a pod on a climbing plant.

Pea in a sentence

• She shelled each pea from its pod into the bowl.

• A single frozen pea rolled off the edge of his plate.

Where does pea come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word goes back to the Latin 'pisum', the name of the round green seed, which Latin itself borrowed from the Greek 'pison' for the same plant. Old English took it as 'pise' or 'peose', and in Middle English this became 'pease', a form that worked as both singular and plural. Because 'pease' sounded as though it already ended in a plural 's', speakers wrongly assumed a single seed must be a 'pea', and that mistaken singular stuck from around the 1600s onward. This kind of back-formation, where a false singular is carved out of a supposed plural, also gave us 'cherry' from the older 'cherise'. The old form survives fossilised in the nursery rhyme phrase 'pease pudding', which is why the modern spelling looks so short and plain.

How the word is built

• pea (back-formed singular from earlier 'pease', once both singular and plural)