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Italian Strings for Dinner

Martin Maiden
Professor of Romance Languages
Trinity College, Oxford University

The sixteenth century Italian writer Agostino Ricchi describes a labyrinth from which it was impossible to escape, whether by means of a thread (like Ariadne) or by using "spaghetti". In describing one of his scientific experiments, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) writes that he had attached two balls to thin "spaghetti". Pieces of pasta would be a curious means of escaping from a labyrinth or conducting an experiment with weights, so clearly "spaghetti' once had a different meaning from the one which has become familiar in English!

What Ricchi and Galileo understood by "spaghetti" was "small strings" (a meaning the word still has, by the way, in modern Italian). The word can be broken down into three elements: "spago" which means "string" or "cord", the diminutive suffix "-ett", which indicates smallness in this case, and the plural ending "-i". In Italian "spaghetti" is a plural word, so Italians say "the spaghetti (or strings) are getting cold". (The word may also still be understood as meaning "little strings" as well as the food.) Spaghetti is so called because it has the form of "little strings".

While there are plenty of examples from medieval times onwards of the word used in the sense of "little strings", "spaghetti" as foodstuff is recorded in Italian only from about the turn of the nineteenth century, and in English only from the mid nineteenth century. "Spaghetti" is so widely recognized as the characteristic national foodstuff of Italy that the word has sometimes been used in English to represent "Italian", as in spaghetti western "a western filmed in Italy". In English, the word has taken on a further life of its own, sometimes being used to describe things that form a tangled mess: near Birmingham in Great Britain there is a major road junction made up of multiple flyovers carrying intersecting highways which is universally, but wholly unofficially, known as "Spaghetti Junction", because of its tangled appearance.

The one word "spaghetti" is a wonderful story of how words change over time as they pass from language to language, from mind to mind.