Salsa

How to spell salsa

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce salsa

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does salsa mean?

1. nounA spicy sauce of tomatoes, chillies, and onions, served with Mexican and Latin American food.
2. nounA lively style of Latin American dance music, and the partner dance performed to it.

Salsa in a sentence

• She spooned a generous helping of salsa over the tacos.

• They signed up for weekly salsa lessons at the community centre.

• The recipe calls for fresh tomatoes, lime, and coriander to make the salsa.

• The band played fast salsa all night and the floor stayed packed.

Where does salsa come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word comes straight from Spanish salsa, meaning simply 'sauce'. The Spanish form descends from the Latin salsa, the feminine of salsus, which literally meant 'salted' and was itself built on sal, the Latin word for 'salt'. The same salty root sits inside the English words 'sauce', 'sausage', and even 'salad', all of which trace back to the idea of food that has been seasoned with salt. English borrowed the food sense in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Mexican and Latin American cooking spread northward, and the dance-and-music sense followed later in the twentieth century from Caribbean and Latin styles popularised in New York, where calling the lively blend a 'sauce' was a natural piece of slang. Because the word arrived intact from Spanish, the spelling is phonetic and stable: the trap is mainly remembering the single 's' in the middle rather than the doubled sound the ear sometimes imagines.

How the word is built

• sals- (from Latin salsa: salted, sauce)
• -a (feminine noun ending carried over from Spanish)