soup
Definitions
General English
- noun a liquid food which you eat hot from a bowl at the beginning of a meal, usually made from meat, fish or vegetables
Food
- A flavoured liquid based on meat and/or vegetable extracts in water, milk or occasionally water only, with added ingredients. Derived from the old English ‘sop’, a term applied to hard bread dipped into water or wine to make it palatable. There are 7 classical types of soup: consommé, potage, broth, purée, cream, velouté and bisque plus a few specials, often cold, based on fruit or tomato juice, wine and the like.
Travel
- noun a liquid dish usually eaten at the beginning of a meal
Origin & History of “soup”
Soup was borrowed from French soupe. this, like its English relative sop, originally denoted a ‘piece of bread soaked in liquid’. One way of making such sops was to put them in the bottom of a bowl and pour broth over them, and eventually soupe came to denote the ‘broth’ itself – the sense in which English acquired it. The word was descended from late Latin suppa, a derivative of the verb *suppāre ‘soak’, which was formed from the borrowed Germanic base *sup- (source of English sop and sup ‘drink’).
