Pulp

How to spell pulp

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pulp

What does pulp mean?

1. nounA soft, moist, shapeless mass, especially the fleshy part of a fruit or a fibrous slurry used to make paper.
2. verbTo crush or reduce something into a soft, shapeless mass.

Pulp in a sentence

• noun

  The orange juice was thick with pulp floating in it.

• verb

  You can pulp the tomatoes by hand before adding them to the sauce.

• noun

  The mill turns recycled paper back into a wet pulp before pressing it into sheets.

• verb

  The machine will pulp the old documents into fibre for recycling.

Where does pulp come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin pulpa, which meant the soft fleshy part of an animal body or the fleshy interior of a fruit. By extension it also referred to the soft inner tissue inside a stem or, much later, the inner part of a tooth. English took it up in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, first describing the juicy flesh of fruit, and the meaning then broadened to cover any soft, moist, shapeless mass. When papermaking from rags and wood fibre grew common, the wet fibrous slurry that becomes paper was naturally called pulp too. The same Latin root gives us the medical adjective 'pulpy', and in the twentieth century cheap magazines printed on rough wood-pulp paper lent their name to 'pulp fiction'. The spelling stayed close to the Latin original, so the only real trap is the soft, almost swallowed final 'p' after the 'l'.

How the word is built

• pulp (from Latin pulpa: fleshy part of an animal or fruit); a single unsegmented root with no prefix or suffix