Imagine this scenario: You have a piping hot bowl of spaghetti bolognese in front of you, and you dig your spoon and fork in to twirl up one lone noodle. But what, exactly, are you supposed to call that singular strand of pasta?
As it turns out, the word for an individual piece of spaghetti: spaghetto. Is your mind blown, or what?
Earlier this week, Twitter user @caroramsey tweeted out a screenshot of the dictionary definition of spaghetto, which is "a single strand of spaghetti." Her followers responded with utter shock, because this is what the Internet does.
A quick crash course in Italian language: An i on the end of a word indicates that it's plural, while an o or an a indicates that it's singular. So, gnocco, is the singular for gnocchi, fettucino is the singular for fettucini, and raviolo is the singular for ravioli.
While anyone who speaks Italian (or at least speaks Italian food) is probably looking at their Twitter feed shouting, "Of course it's spaghetto!!!" the people of Twitter have been overwhelmingly surprised by the news. And spaghetto isn't the only recent discovery that has pasta and pizza lovers everywhere feeling like they've been living a lie. Since @caroramsey's initial tweet, Twitter users have been sharing some more Italian language FYIs, like the fact that the e at the end of calzone isn't silent (so it's actually pronounced calzon-e), and the o in the middle of risotto is short ("ris-ah-to"). The more you know. 🌠
Still, the most important question of all, posed by Twitter user @snjoa, remains: If spaghetti is plural and spaghetto is singular, then what in the heck is a SpaghettiO? The world may never know.