macaroni

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   pasta formed into narrow tubes, especially short curved tubes

   She stirred grated cheese into the hot macaroni.

2. 2
   noun

   historical: an eighteenth-century British man who affected extravagant Continental fashion, manners, and taste

   The portrait shows a macaroni in a towering wig and brilliantly coloured coat.

From Italian maccheroni, plural of maccherone, a pasta name of uncertain origin. In eighteenth-century Britain, travellers associated Continental food and taste with fashionable sophistication; macaroni became the name of an extravagantly dressed subculture and then a term for one of its members.

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