Linguistic Wonders Series: Meaning of Vermicelli

A Diet of Worms and Butterflies

by Martin Maiden Professor of Romance Languages Trinity College, Oxford University

"Vermicelli" is a very fine kind of spaghetti. Rather like the word "spaghetti" (written about previously), "vermicelli" can be divided into three main elements: the ending -"i" is a marker of "plural" (in Italian "vermicelli" is a plural word, so Italians say that the "vermicelli are ready", etc.), "-ell" is a suffix which, like the "-ett"- of "spaghetti", is associated with "smallness" or "delicacy" (the "-ic" which precedes it is merely an 'empty' element linking "-ell" to "verm-"). This leaves "verm-", and those who unsuspectingly tuck into a plate of vermicelli might be more hesitant to do so if they realized that "verm"- is from the Italian word "verme", meaning "worm".

"Vermicelli", means, literally, "little worms", and is so-called because of the worm-like shape of the pasta. "Vermicelli" seems to have been a perfectly normal way of saying "little worms" in Italian for several centuries, and the first recorded instance of the word in the sense of foodstuff dates from the mid seventeenth century (nowadays, a more common modern Italian diminutive of "worm" is "vermiciattolo").

Resemblances in shape are behind a number of other pasta names: "lancette" are lance-shaped or spear-shaped and the word is made up of "lancia" "lance" + diminutive "-ett" + the feminine plural ending "-e"(by the way, the same word can mean "hands of a clock" in Italian). "Fusilli" are shaped like little spindles and the word comes from fuso "spindle" + diminutive suffix "-ill" (a southern Italian dialect variant of the "-ell" that appears in "vermicelli") + plural -"i". There is also farfalle, literally "butterflies", used to describe a butterfly-shaped pasta (the same resemblance in shape is behind the use, in Italian, of "farfalla" to mean a "bow-tie").

Few cuisines are as imaginative and based on such a wide variety of diminutive objects as Italian.