# spaghetti

Pronunciation: say "spuh-GET-ee" /spəˈɡɛti/

## Noun

1. Pasta made in long, thin, solid strands that are round in cross section.
   - Simple: Long, thin pasta shaped like strings, usually boiled and eaten with sauce.
   - _She boiled the spaghetti until it was tender, then drained it._
   - _Fresh spaghetti cooks faster than the dried kind from a box._
2. A prepared dish in which spaghetti is the main ingredient, such as spaghetti bolognese.
   - Simple: A meal made mostly of cooked spaghetti, often with sauce on top.
   - _The cafe's spaghetti arrived piled high with a rich tomato sauce._
   - _He finished his plate of spaghetti and asked for seconds._
3. A tangle of long, thin material resembling pasta strands in look or texture. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: A tangled mass of long, thin things that look like cooked pasta.
   - _The server room was a spaghetti of network cables no one dared touch._
   - _She pulled a hopeless spaghetti of necklaces from the drawer._
4. A complex road junction where multiple routes interweave, especially a multilevel interchange on a highway. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: A group of roads that cross and loop over each other in a confusing way.
   - _Commuters dread the spaghetti where three highways meet north of town._
   - _Engineers redesigned the spaghetti to ease the daily traffic jams._
5. Insulating tubing or bundled wiring used in electrical equipment. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: Thin insulating tubes or wires used in electrical work.
   - _Each solder joint was protected with a short length of spaghetti._
   - _The kit included colored spaghetti for labeling the wires._
6. A confusing or intricate situation, hard to untangle or make sense of. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: A confusing, complicated mess that is hard to understand.
   - _The company's approval process is a spaghetti of overlapping rules._
   - _Trying to follow the story, viewers got lost in a spaghetti of subplots._
7. Ellipsis of spaghetti code. *(colloquial)* — Ellipsis of spaghetti code (“unstructured or poorly structured program source code, especially code with many GOTO statements or their equivalent”).
   - Simple: Short for spaghetti code. Use it to talk about messy, hard-to-follow computer code.
   - _Maintaining the legacy system meant wading through years of spaghetti._
   - _The junior developer's first script was a tangle of spaghetti._
8. Ellipsis of spaghetti western. — Ellipsis of spaghetti western (“a motion picture depicting a story of cowboys and desperadoes set in the American Old West, but produced by an Italian-based company and filmed in Europe, notably in Italy”).
   - Simple: Short for spaghetti western. Use it for a cowboy movie made by Italian filmmakers in Europe.
9. A derogatory term for an Italian person. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: An insulting word for a person from Italy.
   - _Bigots in the old neighborhood sneered at the newcomers, branding each one a spaghetti._
   - _He grew up hearing strangers call his father a spaghetti._

## Verb

10. To cause something to become tangled or knotted. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: To tangle something up into a messy knot.
   - _Careless packing can spaghetti the cables into one stubborn knot._
   - _The toddler spaghettied the ball of string in seconds._
12. To become tangled or knotted. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: To get tangled up into a knot.
   - _Loose cables tend to spaghetti whenever they're left in a drawer._
   - _The fishing lines spaghettied during the long boat ride._
13. To cause someone or something to become, or seem to become, longer and thinner. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: To stretch something so it gets longer and thinner.
   - _Animators can spaghetti a character's limbs for comic effect._
   - _The artist spaghettied the figure until it looked impossibly tall._
14. To stretch out, or seem to stretch out, into a shape that is longer and thinner than before. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: To get longer and thinner, or to seem to.
   - _Reflections in the curved glass spaghetti and twist._
   - _Her silhouette spaghettied as the sunlight stretched it long._
15. To eat spaghetti as a meal. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: To eat a meal of spaghetti.
   - _On Fridays the whole family likes to spaghetti together._
   - _They spaghettied late into the evening, twirling forkful after forkful._
16. To serve someone a meal of spaghetti. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: To serve spaghetti to someone.
   - _The chef will spaghetti the entire wedding party tonight._
   - _They spaghettied us so generously we could barely move._

## Noun

11. Plural of spaghetto. Rare: spaghetti is usually a mass noun, not counted strand by strand. *(rare)* — plural of spaghetto
   - Simple: Plural of spaghetto. This use is rare: people usually say strands of spaghetti.

## Origin

The noun is borrowed from Italian spaghetti, the plural of spaghetto ("a strand of spaghetti"), from spago ("cord, string, twine") plus the diminutive suffix -etto. Spago comes from Latin spagus ("twine"), probably from Ancient Greek sphákos (a kind of sage), itself probably of Pre-Greek origin. The verb comes from the noun.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/spaghetti (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).