focaccia

Forms

focaccia f (plural focacce)^[1] Old Italian forms include focacia, Old Italian foccaccia, Old Italian fugaça and Old Italian fughaze, the last two from the north.^[2] An older Tuscan form with the consonants swapped, cofaccia, is recorded from the 14th century and survives in popular Pistoiese.^[3][4] The Venetian word is fugazza, which keeps the vowel of Latin “focus”.^[5]

Etymology

It is inherited from Late Latin focācia, the feminine of the Late Latin adjective focācius, used of bread baked on the hearth or under the ashes, from Latin focus (“hearth, fireplace”).^[6][7][8][1] Isidore of Seville uses it of bread cooked on the hearth, as opposed to furnācius (“oven-baked”) bread; the adjective is first found in the Itala, the early Latin Bible.^[4][1] Some dictionaries start from a *focācea of Vulgar Latin beside the Late Latin form.^[9][10] Medieval Latin focacea is recorded from the 9th century, and a Paduan codex of 1165 has Medieval Latin fugacia.^[4][3]

The word is found across the Romance languages except Romanian: French fouace, Occitan fogassa, Catalan fogassa, Spanish hogaza and Portuguese fogaça.^[7][11][4] Through Serbo-Croatian it passed on into Romanian, Hungarian, Albanian and Medieval Greek.^[11][4] Sicilian fuazza was taken from the French word.^[4]

The origin of the Latin noun is uncertain: de Vaan rejects a link with Latin fax (“torch”), and the derivation from a root meaning “to burn” proposed by Hamp runs into problems of dating.^[12] Wiktionary lists the link with Old Armenian բոց (bocʻ, “flame”) and the alternative root Proto-Indo-European *dʰegʷʰ- (“to burn”).^[1] In Italian the Latin group /kj/ after the stress became ⟨cc⟩, which brought the word in line with the nouns in -accia.^[13]

Earliest recorded meaning

The TLIO's first record is in a set of Paduan school exercises of the mid-13th century, with the sense “a round flat cake of bread dough, baked in the oven or under the ashes”.^[2][7] DELI's first Tuscan record is the vernacular Bible of the late 14th century, which tells of each person receiving “a piece of roast buffalo meat, a focaccia of bread and a fritter fried in oil” (una pezza di carne di buffala rosta, una foccaccia di pane e una fritella fritta in olio).^[6][10]

Semantic evolution

Boccaccio already uses the proverb rendere pan per focaccia, “to give bread for focaccia”, that is, to pay someone back in kind.^[3][5] Francesco da Buti compares the moon, seen round and high in the sky, to a flattened focaccia.^[5] In the 16th century Alunno notes that the old texts' focaccia is what is called pinza, schiacciata or fogaccina.^[10]

Tommaseo remarked that by his time the word was more used outside Tuscany, where schiacciata was the usual name, and that the Venetian focaccia was a sweet richer than the Tuscan flatbread.^[5][14] The modern regional uses follow this: in the north the word names various sweet leavened cakes, in the south dishes of thin layers of dough with a filling, baked in the oven.^[6][14] In the textile industry it also names a package of yarn wound without a core.^[8][15]

English has borrowed the word;^[16][17] DIFIT records a first form focachio in 1823, while Etymonline dates the current use to 1994.^[16][17]

Timeline

• 1165 – A Paduan codex has Medieval Latin fugacia.^[3]
• c. 1250 – The Paduan school exercises have the earliest Italian record.^[2]
• 14th century – The Tuscan variant cofaccia appears.^[4]
• 1353 – Zingarelli dates the word to this year.^[18]
• Late 14th century – The vernacular Bible uses foccaccia.^[6]
• 16th century – The diminutives focaccetta and focaccina are recorded.^[4]
• 1823 – English focachio is recorded.^[16]
• 1994 – English focaccia is in use.^[17]

Meanings

Noun

1. A flat bread, thin and flattened, seasoned with oil or other toppings and baked in the oven: una focaccia alle olive appena sfornata.^[8][19][9]
2. A round, flat cake of leavened dough, sometimes with raisins or candied fruit; in northern Italy the name of various traditional sweets.^[8][19][14]
3. (southern Italy) A baked dish of thin layers of pastry with a filling.^[8][6]
4. (textiles) A package of yarn wound without a core, layered from the outside inwards.^[8][15]

Word family

• focaccina
• focaccetta

Related words

• fuoco
• cofaccia
• Latin focus
• French fouace

Usage notes

The proverb rendere pan per focaccia means to return a wrong, often with interest.^[18][14][20] In Tuscany the flatbread is more often called schiacciata.^[14]

References

1. ^ a b c d e Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (1997–), Opera del Vocabolario Italiano, CNR, Firenze; tlio.ovi.cnr.it
3. ^ a b c d Prati, Angelico (1951), Vocabolario etimologico italiano, Milano: Garzanti, p. 449
4. ^ a b c d e f g h Battisti, Carlo; Alessio, Giovanni (1950–1957), Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols., Firenze: Barbèra (reprint 1975), p. 1672
5. ^ a b c d Tommaseo, Niccolò; Bellini, Bernardo (1861–1879), Dizionario della lingua italiana, 4 vols., Torino: UTET
6. ^ a b c d e Cortelazzo, Manlio; Zolli, Paolo (1999), Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 2nd ed. by Manlio Cortelazzo and Michele A. Cortelazzo, Bologna: Zanichelli
7. ^ a b c Nocentini, Alberto; Parenti, Alessandro (2010), l'Etimologico: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Firenze: Le Monnier
8. ^ a b c d e f De Mauro, Tullio (ed.) (2003), Grande dizionario italiano dell'uso, CD-ROM version 2.0, Torino: UTET
9. ^ a b Sabatini, Francesco; Coletti, Vittorio; Manfredini, Manuela (2026), Dizionario italiano Sabatini Coletti, digital ed., Milano: Sansoni / Rizzoli Larousse
10. ^ a b c Battaglia, Salvatore; Bàrberi Squarotti, Giorgio (1961–2002), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Torino: UTET; digital ed. Accademia della Crusca
11. ^ a b Meyer-Lübke, Wilhelm (1935), Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3rd ed., Heidelberg: Winter
12. ^ de Vaan, Michiel (2008), Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 7, Leiden; Boston: Brill
13. ^ Devoto, Giacomo (1968), Avviamento alla etimologia italiana: dizionario etimologico, 2nd ed., Firenze: Le Monnier
14. ^ a b c d e Duro, Aldo (ed.) (1986–1994), Vocabolario della lingua italiana, Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana; online ed. treccani.it/vocabolario (2008 copy)
15. ^ a b Vocabolario della lingua italiana Treccani (2011), Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana
16. ^ a b c Stammerjohann, Harro, et al. (2008), Dizionario di italianismi in francese, inglese, tedesco, Firenze: Accademia della Crusca; online at difit.italianisticaonline.it
17. ^ a b c Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
18. ^ a b Zingarelli, Nicola (2009), Lo Zingarelli 2010: vocabolario della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli
19. ^ a b Devoto, Giacomo; Oli, Gian Carlo; Serianni, Luca; Trifone, Maurizio (2026), Nuovo Devoto–Oli: il vocabolario dell'italiano contemporaneo, digital ed., Milano: Le Monnier
20. ^ Gabrielli, Aldo (2020), Grande dizionario italiano, digital ed., Milano: Hoepli