pizza

pronunciation

How to pronounce pizza in British English: UK [ˈpiːtsə] word uk audio image

How to pronounce pizza in American English: US [ˈpiːtsə] word us audio image

Noun:

Italian open pie made of thin bread dough spread with a spiced mixture of e.g. tomato sauce and cheese

Word Origin

pizza: pizza: [20] Italian pizza is quite a broad term, signifying ‘cake’, ‘tart’ or ‘pie’ and encompassing dishes as diverse as a closed fruit pie and a flat bread-dough base with a topping. It is the latter, of course, that brought the word into English. At first, both the word and the foodstuff were unfamiliar enough for the tautologous name ‘pizza pie’ to be deemed necessary, but the fast-food revolution from the 1960s onwards has thoroughly naturalized pizza (US fast-food outlets have their own abbreviation, za).The origin of the Italian word is uncertain. It has been linked with Vulgar Latin *picea, a derivative of Latin pyx ‘pitch’ (in which case it would be paralleled by Welsh bara pyglyd, literally ‘pitchy bread’, possibly a reference to its colour, from which English gets pikelet [18], the name of a type of tea-cake), but it could also be related to modern Greek pitta (source of English pitta [20]), which may be a descendant of classical Greek peptos ‘cooked’.

pizza (n.): 1935, from Italian pizza, originally "cake, tart, pie," of uncertain origin. The 1907 "Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana" reports it is said to be from dialectal pinza "clamp" (from Latin pinsere "to pound, stamp"). Klein suggests a connection via loan-translation with Medieval Greek pitta "cake, pie," from Greek pitta "pitch" (cognate with Latin adjective piceus "of pitch"). See also pita.

4. Some of this is explained by the rise of the pizza , now part of the french staple diet .

5. People readily go for it not knowing that just a slice of medium size pizza can give them 350 to 500 calories .