Pizza

How to spell pizza

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pizza

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pizza mean?

1. nounA flat round base of baked dough covered with toppings such as tomato, cheese, and other ingredients.

Pizza in a sentence

• They ordered a large pizza with extra cheese for the office lunch.

• The recipe shows how to stretch the dough into a thin pizza base.

Where does pizza come from?

Language of origin: Italian

Pizza comes straight from Italian, where it named a flat, baked disc of dough long before it carried tomato and cheese. The word is first recorded in the Neapolitan and southern Italian dialects, and its ultimate origin is genuinely debated: some scholars trace it to a Lombardic or Germanic word 'bizzo' or 'pizzo' meaning a bite or a mouthful, while others connect it to the same family as Greek 'pitta', a flat baked bread. The savoury tomato-topped dish that the world now knows took shape in Naples during the 1700s and 1800s, and English picked the word up in the late 1800s, mostly through Italian immigrant communities. Because English borrowed the spelling wholesale, the tricky doubled 'zz' (pronounced 'ts') stayed intact, which is exactly the part writers second-guess. The same Italian root also gives us 'pizzeria', the place where the dish is made.

How the word is built

• pizza (a single Italian root, not built from separable parts; the doubled 'zz' carries the /ts/ sound)