Tortilla

How to spell tortilla

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce tortilla

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tortilla mean?

1. nounA thin, round flatbread made from maize or wheat flour, used in Mexican and Tex-Mex cooking.
2. nounIn Spain, a thick omelette made with eggs and potato, often served in slices.

Tortilla in a sentence

• She warmed a tortilla in the pan before adding the beans and cheese.

• The tapas bar in Madrid served a wedge of tortilla made with eggs, potato and onion.

• The recipe calls for one large flour tortilla folded around the grilled chicken.

• He ordered a slice of tortilla española with his glass of wine.

Where does tortilla come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word comes straight from Spanish, where tortilla is the diminutive of torta, meaning a round cake or loaf; the literal sense is therefore 'little cake'. The Spanish torta itself goes back to the Late Latin torta, a word for a round, twisted loaf of bread, which is also the distant source of English 'tart' and 'torte'. When Spanish colonists reached the Americas they applied tortilla to the flat maize bread that indigenous peoples had baked for centuries, and that food meaning travelled into English in the nineteenth century. The double 'l' is the spelling trap for English writers: in Spanish 'll' is pronounced like a 'y', which is why the word sounds like 'tor-tee-ya' even though it is written with two letter l's. Note also that in Spain the same word names a thick potato-and-egg omelette, a meaning that confuses travellers who expect a flat bread.

How the word is built

• torta (round cake/loaf)
• -illa (Spanish diminutive: little)