Soup
nounA savoury liquid food made by simmering ingredients such as meat, vegetables, or pulses in stock or water.
How to spell soup
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce soup
What does soup mean?
- nounA savoury liquid food made by simmering ingredients such as meat, vegetables, or pulses in stock or water.
Soup in a sentence
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She warmed a bowl of tomato soup for lunch.
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The recipe calls for two tins of chicken soup.
Where does soup come from?
Language of origin: French
Soup arrived in English in the 1600s from the French soupe, which meant a broth or, originally, a piece of bread soaked in liquid. The French word traces back through Late Latin suppa to a Germanic source, related to the old verb meaning 'to soak' or 'to sup', and that same root gives us the everyday English word 'sup', to take liquid in small mouthfuls. The earliest sense was literally the soaked bread itself rather than the liquid, and only later did the name transfer to the broth that the bread sat in. Curiously, the word 'supper' shares this family, since an evening 'supper' was once a meal of sopped bread and broth. The spelling keeps the French 'ou' rather than the simpler 'oo' an English speaker might expect, which is the small trap worth remembering.
How the word is built
- soup (single root, from Old French soupe: broth poured over bread)
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