Spaghetti

How to spell spaghetti

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce spaghetti

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does spaghetti mean?

1. nounA type of pasta made in long, thin, round strands, usually served with a sauce.

Spaghetti in a sentence

• She boiled a pot of spaghetti for dinner.

• The recipe calls for spaghetti tossed in a rich tomato sauce.

Where does spaghetti come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word comes straight from Italian, where spaghetti is the plural of spaghetto, the diminutive of spago, meaning a length of cord, string, or twine. The image is wonderfully literal: each strand is a thin little string, so spaghetti effectively means 'little cords'. The spago root traces back to a Latin word for a thin rope or pack-thread. English took the term on in the nineteenth century as Italian pasta dishes spread through Britain and America, and it kept its native Italian spelling untouched. That foreign origin is exactly where the spelling traps come from: the silent-feeling 'gh' that English speakers rarely pair this way, and the doubled 't' that mirrors the original Italian form.

How the word is built

• spago (cord, string)
• -etto (Italian diminutive)
• -i (Italian plural ending)