Sauce

How to spell sauce

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sauce

What does sauce mean?

1. nounA liquid or soft preparation served with or used in cooking food to add flavour or moisture.
2. nounInformal British term for cheeky, impudent talk or behaviour toward someone.

Sauce in a sentence

• She poured a rich tomato sauce over the pasta.

• The teenager gave his mother a bit of sauce when asked to tidy his room.

• The recipe calls for a splash of soy sauce near the end.

• The waiter answered with such sauce that the manager apologised.

Where does sauce come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin salsa, the plural of salsus, meaning 'salted', which in turn derives from sal, the Latin word for 'salt'. In the kitchens of the Roman world a salsa was a salted or seasoned liquid served with food, and that culinary sense carried straight through into the Romance languages. English borrowed it through Old French sauce (also spelled sausse) in the 1300s, keeping both the meaning and much of the spelling. The same salty root sits inside several familiar relatives: 'salad' (originally salted greens), 'salami', 'sausage', and even 'salsa', which is simply the modern Spanish form of the very same word. The unexpected spelling trap is the silent-feeling 'au' followed by the soft 'ce'; remembering that it shares its origin with 'salt' and 'salad' helps anchor why it is not spelled the way it sounds.

How the word is built

• sauce (whole word, from Latin salsa 'salted things'); no separable prefix or suffix in modern English