pizza

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   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.

   a slice of pizza

2. 2
   noun

   A single instance of this dish.

   He ate a whole pizza!

3. 3
   noun

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

4. 4
   noun

   snowplow: a maneuver in which the tips of the skis or skates point inwards and the back ends point outwards.

5. 5
   name

   A surname from Italian.

Etymology

Etymology tree Byzantine Greek πίτα (píta)der. Neapolitan pizzabor. English pizza 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 sugges…