Pie

How to spell pie

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pie

What does pie mean?

1. nounA baked dish with a pastry base or covering, filled with fruit, meat, or vegetables.

Pie in a sentence

• She pulled a steaming apple pie out of the oven.

• The café sells a different savoury pie every lunchtime.

Where does pie come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Pie has been part of English since the 1300s, when it named a baked dish of meat or fish sealed under a pastry crust. The most widely accepted theory links it to 'magpie', the black-and-white bird whose old name was simply 'pie', from the Latin pica meaning 'magpie'. The reasoning is that a magpie collects an odd jumble of bits and pieces, and an early pie likewise held a miscellaneous mixture of ingredients gathered under one crust. Over the centuries the word narrowed and softened, moving from those mixed savoury pies to the sweet fruit pies common today. The spelling stayed short and simple, with the long 'i' sound carried by a plain 'ie', which is why it almost never trips adult writers up.

How the word is built

• pie (single root, no affixes)

Words that sound like pie

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

• pi: The mathematical constant equal to the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, roughly 3.14159.