Sausage

How to spell sausage

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sausage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sausage mean?

1. nounA food made of minced meat and seasoning packed into a tube of edible casing.

Sausage in a sentence

• He fried a thick sausage for breakfast with eggs and toast.

• The butcher recommended a spicy sausage for the barbecue.

Where does sausage come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes from the Latin salsus, the past participle of salire, meaning 'to salt', so at its root a sausage is literally 'salted meat'. The Latin form passed into Old North French as saussiche, and from there into Middle English in the 1400s. The spelling preserves a hint of its salty origin: the 'sau' at the front descends from the same family that gives us 'sauce' and 'salsa', all rooted in the idea of salting and seasoning. The trap for modern writers is the unstressed second syllable, which sounds like a weak schwa and tempts the misspelling 'sausuge' or 'sausag', and the silent ending '-age' pronounced 'ij' rather than spelled out. Knowing the link to 'salt' and 'sauce' helps anchor that opening 'sau'.

How the word is built

• sauс- (from Latin salsus: salted)
• -age (noun suffix forming a thing or product)