Everyday LifeGreek → English
Pasta
/ˈpɑːstə/noun
Dough of wheat flour and water shaped into strands, tubes or sheets and boiled.
The Greek roots
πάστη
pástē
barley porridge
Literally: “salted, sprinkled stuff”
Follow a root:πάστη2 words
The story of the word
Late Latin pasta, meaning dough or paste, was lifted from Greek πάστη, a barley porridge, from παστός, sprinkled or salted. Everything soft and mixable in the European kitchen descends from that one Latin word: paste, pasty, pâté, pastry and pasta itself. English only started using pasta for the Italian food in the later nineteenth century, when Italian restaurants arrived.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → Italian → English
- First recorded
- 1870s
Same family
pastepastrypastyimpasto
In a sentence
There is always pasta in the cupboard, which is the whole point of pasta.