Sandwich

How to spell sandwich

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sandwich

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sandwich mean?

1. nounTwo or more slices of bread with a filling of meat, cheese, or other food between them.
2. verbTo squeeze or insert something tightly between two other things.

Sandwich in a sentence

• noun

  She packed a cheese sandwich for the train journey.

• verb

  They had to sandwich the short meeting between two longer appointments.

• noun

  The cafe sells a ham and mustard sandwich at lunchtime.

• verb

  They had to sandwich the spare mattress between the wardrobe and the wall.

Where does sandwich come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word famously comes from a person, not a recipe: John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, an eighteenth-century English aristocrat. The popular story holds that around 1762 he asked for slices of meat served between two pieces of bread so that he could keep eating without leaving the gaming table, and the convenient meal took his title as its name. The title itself comes from the town of Sandwich in Kent, whose name was built from Old English elements, roughly 'sand' plus 'wic', the latter meaning a dwelling, harbour, or trading settlement. That buried -wich ending, pronounced as a soft 'wich' rather than spelled out, is exactly what trips writers up, since the 'd' before it is almost silent in speech. The same -wich settlement element survives in many British place names such as Norwich, Greenwich, and Ipswich, all sharing that Old English root.

How the word is built

• sand (sand)
• -wich (from Old English wic: dwelling or market settlement); later reanalysed as a single word naming a food