pepperoni

UK/pɛpəˈɹəʊni/US/pɛpəˈɹoʊni/

nounB1Common in everyday speech and writing · #5,222 of 15,258mostly spoken

Pepperoni is a spicy red sausage sliced onto pizza. Pepperoni pizza, slices of pepperoni, extra pepperoni.

It is American, not Italian, and asking for it in Italy gets you peppers — the Italian peperoni means bell peppers. It is the commonest pizza topping in the United States by a wide margin. Note the single p in the Italian and the double in the English.

Definitions of pepperoni

1nounpepperoniA spicy red sausage sliced onto pizza.B1
“I'll have a large pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms, please.”

pepperoni is a sausage.

Where it comes from

From Italian peperoni, bell peppers, the plural of peperone. The sausage is an American invention.

Italian
peperoni — bell peppers
English, today
pepperoni

Built from

peperone · Italian — bell pepper

Italian peperoni (“bell peppers”), the plural of peperone (“bell pepper”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Food & Drink

Practise this word

pepperoni in the wild

Sliced pepperoni is one of the most popular pizza toppings in American pizzerias.
Pepperoni
Traditional pepperoni with natural casing curls into "cups" in the pizza oven's intense heat.
Pepperoni
A pizza puff is a deep-fried dough pocket filled with cheese, tomato sauce, and other pizza ingredients such as sausage or pepperoni.
Pizza puff
The pepperoni roll is an Italian-American stuffed bread roll.
Pepperoni roll
During baking, the fats in the pepperoni (which are hard at room temperature) melt, resulting in a spicy oil suffusing into the bread.
Pepperoni roll

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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.

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