Soy

How to spell soy

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce soy

What does soy mean?

1. nounThe soybean plant, or the food products made from it, such as the sauce, milk, or oil.

Soy in a sentence

• The recipe calls for a tablespoon of soy sauce.

• Many vegetarians rely on soy as a source of protein.

Where does soy come from?

Language of origin: Japanese

Soy traces back to the Japanese word shoyu, the name of the dark fermented sauce made from soybeans, which itself drew on the Chinese roots for 'sauce' and 'oil'. Dutch traders working in East Asia in the seventeenth century encountered the sauce and carried both the product and the word back to Europe, reshaping it as soja. English picked it up from the Dutch in the late 1600s, first as a name for the sauce and only later as a label for the bean and the plant that produce it. Over time the short form 'soy' broadened to cover soy milk, soy oil, and the soybean crop itself. The very compact spelling is a clue to its long journey: the original Japanese sound shoyu was steadily clipped down as the word passed from language to language.

How the word is built

• soy (from Japanese shoyu, the fermented sauce, by way of Dutch soja)