sausage

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English sausige, borrowed from Old Northern French saussiche,^[2][3][4][5] the northern form of salsice (modern saucisse).^[4][6][2] The French word continues Late Latin salsīcia,^[7][8][2] which Etymonline and the American Heritage Dictionary give as a Vulgar Latin form and Merriam-Webster and the Oxford Dictionary of English as Medieval Latin.^[3][9][10] It is a noun use of the neuter plural, or perhaps the feminine singular, of salsīcius (“prepared by salting”),^[2][8][9] formed on salsus (“salted”), the past participle of an old verb meaning "to salt", from sāl (“salt”).^[3][8][11] The Shorter Oxford explains the Latin word as short for a phrase meaning "stuffed (meats) prepared by salting".^[6] Compare salchicha and salsiccia.^[2][12] Weekley mentions another view, that the Italian word is the original, a compound of the words for salt and dried meat.^[12]

Earliest recorded meaning

Minced and spiced meat stuffed into a short length of animal gut: a1500, in a vocabulary printed in Wright and Wülcker's Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies.^[2] Barnhart dates the form sawsyge to about 1450 and Etymonline to the mid-15th century.^[5][3]

Semantic evolution

The spelling sausage is recorded from 1553;^[5] Barnhart thinks it was probably influenced by mistake by the suffix -age.^[5] In the 16th and 17th centuries the word was also spelt sawsage and sassage, and Dickens used sassage as a colloquial pronunciation in 1837.^[3] Cockeram's dictionary (1623) described a sawsidge as "A Pudding made of Capons guts, Porke, and Spice",^[3] and Johnson (1755) as a roll or ball of minced pork or veal with salt and spice, sometimes stuffed into guts.^[13] Anything shaped like a sausage could be called one from 1650.^[2] The word had several military uses: a long tube of powder for firing a mine (1645, after French saucisse), a sausage-shaped observation balloon (1858), a German (1890, slang) and a German trench-mortar bomb (1915).^[2] Later colloquial uses include a term of affection for a person, as in silly old sausage (1934), and not a sausage, nothing at all (1938).^[2] Sausage factory is attested literally by 1831 and figuratively, of something it is better not to know too much about, by 1975.^[3]

Timeline

• about 1450 – sawsyge.^[5]
• a1500 – minced meat in a casing.^[2]
• 1553 – the spelling sausage.^[5]
• 1645 – (military) a tube of powder for firing a mine.^[2]
• 1650 – anything shaped like a sausage.^[2]
• 1858 – a sausage-shaped balloon.^[2]
• 1890 – (slang) a German.^[2]
• 1922 – verb, to treat or shape like a sausage, in Joyce's Ulysses.^[2][6]
• 1934 – a term of affection for a person.^[2]
• 1938 – not a sausage, nothing at all.^[2]

Modern meaning

Noun

1. Finely chopped, seasoned meat, especially pork or beef, often mixed with fat and cereal and packed into a tube-shaped casing of animal gut or synthetic material; one length of this.
2. Any object shaped like a sausage.
3. (informal) A barrage balloon or observation balloon of this shape.
4. (British, informal) An affectionate term for a person, especially in silly sausage.
5. not a sausage (British, informal): nothing at all.

Word family

• sausagelike
• summer sausage
• sausage tree

Related words

• sauce
• salami
• salt
• saucisson

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 q Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f g Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
5. ^ a b c d e f Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
6. ^ a b c Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
8. ^ a b c Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
9. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
10. ^ Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
11. ^ Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
12. ^ a b 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.