piazza

Etymology

It is borrowed from Italian piazza (“square, marketplace”),^[2][3][4][5] from Latin platēa (“courtyard, broad street”),^[3][6][7][4] through Vulgar Latin *plattea,^[8][9] from Ancient Greek πλατεῖα (plateîa), short for "broad (street)",^[6][7][8] the feminine of πλατύς (platús, “broad, flat”),^[6][7][10] from Proto-Indo-European *plat- (“to spread”).^[6][7] The same Latin word gave French place and English place,^[5][3][11] and Weekley compares Spanish plaza.^[12]

Earliest recorded meaning

A public square or marketplace, especially in an Italian town: 1583, in J. Foxe's Actes & Monuments.^[2][3] Merriam-Webster dates the word to 1563.^[4]

Semantic evolution

In the 17th century the word was wrongly applied to the arcade that Inigo Jones built on two sides of Covent Garden in London, instead of to the open market place itself; the OED explains the shift by the Italian custom of building colonnades around squares.^[2][6][12] From this came the sense of a colonnade or covered walk around a square or in front of a building, recorded from 1642^[2][3] and now obsolete in Britain.^[2] Johnson (1755) knew only this sense, a walk under a roof held up by pillars.^[13] The writer Blount already objected that the covered walks of Covent Garden were not properly the Piazza, which was the ground within the rails.^[12] In American English the word moved on to the veranda or porch of a house, first recorded in 1724 in Virginia,^{[2][3][6][14]} and in parts of the Midland to an enclosed walkway between two buildings (1773).^[2] The Dictionary of American Regional English finds the porch sense chiefly in the Northeast and the South Atlantic states, and calls it somewhat old-fashioned.^[14]

Timeline

• 1583 – a public square or marketplace, especially in Italy.^[2][3] Merriam-Webster dates it to 1563.^[4]
• 1642 – a colonnade or covered gallery around a square (obsolete by 1864).^[2][3]
• 1724 – in American English, the veranda or porch of a house.^[2][3][14]
• 1773 – in the American Midland, an enclosed walkway between two buildings.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. An open public square or marketplace, especially in an Italian town: We drank coffee in the piazza by the cathedral.^[4][15][2]
2. (chiefly British) A covered passageway or gallery.^[15]
3. An arcaded, roofed gallery around a court, or a colonnade in front of a building.^[4][2]
4. (US regional) A veranda or porch.^[4][2][14]

Word family

• piazzaed
• piazzian

Related words

• place
• plaza
• platz

Usage notes

The plural is piazzas, or piazze after Italian.^[4][2] The OED notes that its first edition (1906) gave the pronunciation /pɪˈæzə/, which stayed the usual American one through much of the 20th century, while regional speakers, chiefly in the porch sense, sometimes stressed the first syllable.^[2][14]

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
4. ^ a b c d e f g h Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
5. ^ a b Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
7. ^ a b c d The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
8. ^ a b Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
9. ^ Skeat, Walter W. (1911), A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, new ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
10. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
11. ^ Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
12. ^ a b c Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
13. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
14. ^ a b c d e Cassidy, Frederic G. & Joan Houston Hall (eds.) (1985–2002), Dictionary of American Regional English, vols I–IV, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
15. ^ a b Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins