pepper
Pluralpeppers (some meanings)
Verbpeppers, peppering, peppered
Pluralpeppers (some meanings)
Formspeppers, peppering, peppered
- 1The spice made by drying the unripe berries of the pepper plant after fermenting them.
He ground fresh pepper over the pasta before serving.
The recipe calls for a pinch of pepper and a dash of nutmeg.
Note
As a spice the word is a mass noun. You add a pinch of pepper or some pepper, never "a pepper." The plural peppers belongs elsewhere: to the plants and to the capsicum fruit. So "too much pepper" is the seasoning, while "too many peppers" is the vegetables.
- 2A hollow fruit of the capsicum plant, containing seeds and ranging in color from red and green to yellow or white, in varieties from mild and sweet to hot and spicy.
She stuffed each pepper with rice and herbs before baking.
The market sells sweet peppers in red, yellow, and green.
Similarcapsicum
Note
A borrowed name. The capsicum fruit was called pepper for its unusual spicy taste, which recalled the Old World spice, even though the plants are not closely tied. This use of pepper belongs to British, American, Irish and Canadian English. The botanical name capsicum serves as its synonym. Unlike the spice, it counts freely: three peppers, a stuffed pepper.
- 3Any plant belonging to the family Piperaceae.
Several peppers wound their way up the trellis at the garden's edge.
The pepper is cultivated across the tropics for the berries it produces.
Note
The plant behind the spice carries one of the oldest trade names in English: Old English piper, from Latin piper, itself borrowed from an Indo-Aryan word akin to Sanskrit pippali, "long pepper." Its best-known member is the climbing vine Piper nigrum, whose berries yield black pepper. The name later passed to the capsicum fruit because of a similar spicy bite. That borrowing was about taste, not kinship.
- 4To season a dish by adding pepper to it.
He salted and peppered the eggs without tasting them first.
Always pepper the sauce lightly so the flavor stays balanced.
Similarseason
- 5To add something repeatedly, at frequent intervals throughout a larger whole.
He peppered his speech with quotations from old poets.
Writers often pepper their dialogue with slang to make it feel real.
Similarsprinkle, lace, intersperse, season
- 6To cover a surface with many small things scattered all over it.
Wildflowers peppered the hillside with bursts of color.
Stars pepper the night sky in places far from city lights.
Similardot, sprinkle, speckle, stud, fleck
Note
Most at home in the passive, with the scattered things introduced by with: a beach peppered with holes. In the active, the scattered things themselves can be the subject, as when wildflowers pepper a hillside. The sense sits between the striking meaning, where the particles hit something, and the 'at intervals' meaning, where they are spread through something rather than over it.
- 7
- 8A beating or a thrashing.
The veteran took plenty of pepper before finally going down in the eighth.
Critics gave the new policy serious pepper at the committee hearing.
Similarpunishment, beating, hammering, pounding
Note
Old prize-ring slang that treats a beating as a seasoning. A fighter gives or receives pepper, with no article. Dickens drops it into Dombey and Son (1846–48) among other boxing slang: tapped, bunged, made groggy. Henry Downes Miles's Pugilistica (1906) has a fighter vowing to "give him pepper in superior style." The verb carries the same blows.
- 9To beat or thrash someone, or to defeat them heavily.
The champion peppered his challenger for ten brutal rounds.
Veteran sides routinely pepper nervous newcomers in the opening match.
Similarthrash, pummel, batter, trounce, hammer
Note
Shakespeare already has the verb. In Romeo and Juliet (c. 1591–95), a wounded man cries, "I am pepperd for this world… he hath made wormes meate of me." There, being peppered means being finished off, and the passive form carries the blow. Today it is slang for a beating or a heavy defeat. It is the verb behind the boxer's "pepper".
- 10A baseball warm-up drill in which fielders stand close to a batter and quickly return each batted ball to be hit again.
Before batting practice, the infielders loosened up with a round of pepper.
Many ballparks post signs forbidding pepper near the stands.
Note
A dugout word for a quick, close-range drill. The batter taps the ball and the fielders send it straight back, so the bat stays in constant motion. It often works as a modifier, as in a pepper game. Because the drill sends balls flying near the field's edge, some ballparks post signs saying "No pepper games."
- 11A randomly generated value added to another value, such as a password, before hashing. Unlike a salt, a fresh value is created for each input and held separately from it.
Each user's password is combined with a unique pepper before hashing.
Because the pepper is stored apart from the database, a stolen password file alone is not enough.
Note
Cryptography borrowed the kitchen pairing: a pepper works alongside a salt, and a password may be both salted and peppered. What protects a pepper is where it lives. It is kept out of the database, often in application code or a hardware module. A stolen file of hashes therefore does not hand it over. The matching verb describes applying it.
- 12To apply a pepper (a secret value) to data such as a password before hashing it.
The system peppers every credential before applying the hash function.
Engineers often pepper passwords in addition to salting them.
Note
The verb follows salt's pattern. Data is salted and peppered, and a peppered hash is one computed after the secret value went in. The order is part of the meaning, because the pepper is added before hashing, never after. For where that secret is kept and how it differs from a salt, see the noun.
- 13A shotgun: a firearm that discharges a spread of small pellets.
He loaded the pepper and waited quietly in the duck blind.
She kept a battered old pepper mounted above the fireplace.
Similarshotgun
Note
Street slang from Multicultural London English, heard in drill lyrics. Harlem Spartans' "Kennington Where It Started" (2017) has it, and Clavish's "100mph Freestyle x3" (2023) counts three of them. Unlike the boxing beating, it counts as an ordinary noun: a pepper, three peppers. It belongs firmly to that setting and its slang, alongside its verb for shooting.
- 14To fire upon a target with a shotgun, striking it with a spray of small shot.
The guards peppered the fleeing poacher's heels with birdshot.
Farmers would pepper the crows that raided the new seed.
Note
This is the verb partner of the shotgun noun, from the same Multicultural London English slang. Watch the overlap with the everyday "spray with particles" meaning. Shrapnel peppering a wall is ordinary English, but to pepper someone in this slang means to shoot at them. Context, and the setting the word comes from, decides which reading a listener hears.
- 15To write accents or other small marks onto letters in a script to make their sound or meaning clear.
The copyist peppered the manuscript with vowel points for new readers.
Teachers pepper the unfamiliar letters with diacritics to guide pronunciation.
Similarmark
Note
A writer's slang for the small marks scattered over letters: accents, points and other signs that settle how a word is read. It takes the marked text as its object, as in peppering a manuscript. Because it is slang, formal writing about scripts uses plainer verbs. There you would add diacritics or mark the letters.
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Practice
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Origin
From Middle English peper, from Old English piper, from Proto-West Germanic *pipar, borrowed from Latin piper, which came from an Indo-Aryan source; compare Sanskrit pippali ('long pepper'). It is related to Dutch peper, German Pfeffer, and Swedish peppar.