Pizza
name, noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A baked Italian dish of a thinly rolled bread crust typically topped before baking with tomato sauce, cheese, and other ingredients such as meat or vegetables. uncountable
"a slice of pizza"
- 2 Italian open pie made of thin bread dough spread with a spiced mixture of e.g. tomato sauce and cheese wordnet
- 3 A single instance of this dish. countable
"He ate a whole pizza!"
- 4 snowplow: a maneuver in which the tips of the skis or skates point inwards and the back ends point outwards. countable, uncountable
- 1 A surname from Italian.
Example
More examples"While eating a pizza he was annoying his sister."
Etymology
1931, borrowed from Neapolitan pizza (1590), the Neapolitan dialectal form of Byzantine Greek πίτα (píta, “cake, pie”). The Greek word is first attested in 1107 and is itself of uncertain origin. The northern Italian dialectal form was pinza, the southern (Apulian and Calabrian) form was pitta. This suggests a derivation from Latin pīnctus (pictus (“painted, smeared”)) or pīnsum, pīnsitum, pistum (“pounded”), but the northern forms appear to be contaminated with pinzare (“to staple”). There are alternative suggestions involving Greek etymologies (πηκτή (pēktḗ), πηκτός (pēktós, “compacted, congealed”); πήτεα (pḗtea, “bran”); Ancient Greek πιττάκιον (pittákion, “patch; tablet; ticket”)), more remote possibilities involve comparison with Lombardic pizzo, pizza (“bite, morsel, lump, dumpling”); Albanian petë (“layer”), Romanian pată (“blotch, stain, macula”); Albanian pite (“gruel”); From Aramaic פִיתָּא (pītā, “piece of bread”), Hebrew פַּת (paṯ, “bread”). Doublet of pide and pita.
Related phrases
More for "pizza"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.