Sushi

How to spell sushi

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sushi

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sushi mean?

1. nounA Japanese dish of vinegared rice served with raw fish, seafood, or vegetables.

Sushi in a sentence

• They ordered a platter of sushi for the office lunch.

• The new sushi bar near the station uses fresh tuna and salmon.

Where does sushi come from?

Language of origin: Japanese

Sushi comes directly from Japanese, where the word originally referred not to the modern dish of fish on rice but to a method of preserving fish by packing it in fermented, salted rice. The name is generally understood to combine su, meaning 'vinegar', with a form of meshi, meaning 'cooked rice', so the literal sense points to the soured or vinegared rice that defines the dish rather than the fish on top. As tastes changed in Japan, the slow fermentation gave way to quickly seasoned vinegared rice paired with fresh seafood, and that lighter style is what spread worldwide. English picked the word up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the dish becoming widely familiar in Britain, America, and Canada only from the 1960s onward. Because it is a borrowed Japanese word written in the roman alphabet, the spelling is phonetic and stable, and the main thing to remember is the single 's' sounds in 'su' and 'shi'.

How the word is built

• sushi (unanalysable loanword from Japanese su 'vinegar'
• meshi 'rice', contracted to -shi)