pizza
piz·za/ˈpi.tsə/noun
pizza is spelled P-I-Z-Z-A: 5 letters and 2 syllables (piz·za). It appears 27 times per million words in written English, the 3,422nd most frequent word form (wordfreq, 2021 data). As a noun, pizza means “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…” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). The plural of pizza is pizzas; Wiktionary also lists pizze (rare).
How many letters and syllables are in pizza?
| Letters | 5: P-I-Z-Z-A |
|---|---|
| Syllables | 2: piz·za |
| In writing | 27 times per million words; the 3,422nd most frequent word form |
| Wrong spellings searched | none measured in search |
Sources: letters and syllables from the English Wiktionary's hyphenation or pronunciation; written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How common is pizza?
Pizza appears 27 times per million words in written English, the 3,422nd most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How do you pronounce pizza?
- UK /ˈpiː.tsə/
- UK [ˈpʰit.sə]
- US /ˈpi.tsə/
Pizza has 2 syllables, split piz·za in writing.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-pizza.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of pizza
- pizzas plural
- pizze plural, rare
- pitza
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
What does pizza mean?
The meanings the English Wiktionary records, quoted as written there (source below).
noun
- 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.
a slice of pizza
- 2
A single instance of this dish.
He ate a whole pizza!
- 3
snowplow: a maneuver in which the tips of the skis or skates point inwards and the back ends point outwards.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Pizza in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense Italian dish:
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does pizza come from?
First attested in 1931, borrowed from Neapolitan pizza (1590), the 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”).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).