Tofu

How to spell tofu

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tofu

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tofu mean?

1. nounA soft, pale food made by coagulating soy milk and pressing the curds into blocks, widely used in East Asian and vegetarian cooking.

Tofu in a sentence

• She marinated the tofu before frying it for the stir-fry.

• The recipe suggests draining the tofu to remove excess water.

Where does tofu come from?

Language of origin: Japanese

Tofu reached English through Japanese tōfu, but the Japanese word was itself a borrowing from Chinese dòufu, a compound of dòu, meaning 'bean', and fu, which referred to the curdled or fermented mass that results from coagulating soy milk. The literal sense is therefore close to 'bean curd', and indeed 'bean curd' became the common English translation long before the loanword itself caught on. English speakers met the food and its Japanese name through trade and travel, and the spelling tofu was settled in English during the nineteenth century. The word stayed rare in everyday Western use until vegetarian and East Asian cooking spread widely in the later twentieth century, after which tofu became an ordinary supermarket term. Because the spelling simply transliterates the two short Japanese syllables, it is unusually phonetic and offers very little to trip up the writer.

How the word is built

• tofu (a single unanalysable loanword; from Japanese tōfu, itself from Chinese dòufu: dòu 'bean'
• fu 'curdled, fermented')