Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

marshmallow

UK/mɑːʃˈmæləʊ/US/ˈmɑɹʃˌmɛl.oʊ/
nounA2+Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,858 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: marshmallows

A marshmallow is a soft white sweet that toasts over a fire. Toast marshmallows, a bag of marshmallows, marshmallows in cocoa.

It was originally made from the root of the marsh mallow plant, which grows in salt marshes and gives a soothing sap — that plant is where the name comes from and no modern sweet contains it. The marshmallow test is a famous study of children and self-control.

John Morgan · CC BY 2.0

Definitions of marshmallow

  1. 1nounmarshmallowA soft white sweet.A2+

    “We toasted marshmallows over the fire until they were golden.”

marshmallow is a sweet.

Where it comes from

Old English merscmealwe is marsh plus mallow, the plant whose root sap was the original ingredient.

  1. Old English

    mersċmealwe

  2. English, today

    marshmallow

From Old English mersċmealwe, corresponding to marsh + mallow.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Food & Drink

Practise this word

marshmallow in the wild

  • In a typical preparation, the marshmallow is toasted over a campfire, and the heat of the marshmallow melts the chocolate, fusing the sandwich together.

    S'more

  • The sandwich was first created in the early 20th century after marshmallow creme, a sweet marshmallow-like spread, was invented in Massachusetts.

    Fluffernutter

  • During World War I, a recipe for a peanut butter and marshmallow creme sandwich, the earliest known example of the sandwich, was published.

    Fluffernutter

  • Most ambrosia recipes contain canned (often sweetened) or fresh pineapple, canned mandarin orange slices or fresh orange sections, miniature marshmallows, and coconut.

    Ambrosia (fruit salad)

  • The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification conducted in 1970 by psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University.

    Stanford marshmallow experiment

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.