Pudding

How to spell pudding

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pudding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pudding mean?

1. nounA soft, usually sweet cooked dish served as dessert, such as a baked or boiled one made with flour, eggs, or milk.
2. nounThe sweet course of a meal, eaten after the main dish.

Pudding in a sentence

• She steamed a sticky toffee pudding for the dinner party.

• There was no room left for pudding after such a heavy roast.

• The recipe for bread-and-butter pudding calls for stale slices and custard.

• The children were told to finish their vegetables before any pudding.

Where does pudding come from?

Language of origin: French

The origins of pudding are genuinely murky, and scholars still disagree. The most favoured theory traces it to the Old French word boudin, meaning a sausage or a casing stuffed with minced meat and blood, which itself probably goes back to the Latin botellus, a 'little sausage' (the same root that gives us 'botulism'). That sausage sense explains why the earliest English puddings, recorded from the late 1200s, were savoury: minced meat, oats and spices boiled inside an animal gut, a tradition that survives in black pudding and the Christmas pudding boiled in a cloth. Only over the following centuries did the word drift toward the soft, sweet, boiled or baked dishes we now picture. The doubled d, which is the usual spelling trap, simply mirrors the short, stressed 'u' sound: a single d would tempt a long vowel as in 'puding'.

How the word is built

• pudding (a single root; the final -ing is part of the stem, not the verb-forming suffix)