Chorizzo

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Eye dialect spelling of chorizo. alt-of, countable, pronunciation-spelling, uncountable

    "Another example is the spicy Spanish sausage chorizo. In Spanish the -izo part can be pronounced ‘ee-so’ or ‘ee-tho’. But very often in English what you hear is the Italianate ‘cho-reet-so’, with the z pronounced like the double z of pizza. As you’d expect, you find spellings based on that pronunciation: choritso and chorizzo. Pronouncing a Spanish loan word in an Italian way is one of the many quirks of English."

Example

More examples

"Another example is the spicy Spanish sausage chorizo. In Spanish the -izo part can be pronounced ‘ee-so’ or ‘ee-tho’. But very often in English what you hear is the Italianate ‘cho-reet-so’, with the z pronounced like the double z of pizza. As you’d expect, you find spellings based on that pronunciation: choritso and chorizzo. Pronouncing a Spanish loan word in an Italian way is one of the many quirks of English."

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.