Pizza is a German(ic) Word!
Martin Maiden
Professor of Romance Languages
Trinity College, Oxford University

Today "pizza" is a common part of the international food vocabulary, but it is only recently that both the name and the food itself have acquired widespread international currency. Only 50 years ago, it was principally associated with southern Italy, especially Naples, and there is evidence that even within Italy the word was not widely understood until at least the 17th century. Yet "pizza" has a historical pedigree of over a thousand years. It is first recorded in a Latin text from the southern Italian town of Gaeta in 997 AD, which claims that a tenant of certain property is to give the bishop of Gaeta 'duodecim pizze', "twelve pizzas", every Christmas day, and another twelve every Easter Sunday.

There has been much debate over the origin of the word itself but evidence suggests a common origin with the English words "(to) bite" and "(a) bit". English belongs, with German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian to the family of Germanic languages, all of which are decended from a remote common ancestor called 'Proto-Germanic'.

Italy in the second half of the first millennium AD was subject to the successive domination of two Germanic-speaking peoples, the Goths, who spoke an Eastern Germanic language, Gothic, now defunct, and the Langobards, whose language belonged to the same High Germanic group as modern German. "Pizza" is thought to derive from a Langobard word similar in form to the Old High German "bizzo" or "pizzo", a word related to English 'bite' and 'bit'. This word originally meant 'mouthful' (what you obtain by 'biting'), then later 'piece of bread' (the typical content of a mouthful)'. From there the sense of a particular type of bread-baked foodstuff is only a short hop. (In modern Italian the word has assumed a further life of its own, used metaphorically to denote the circular reel used on movie projectors and also--by a rather obscure development—a 'boring person', or a 'tedious, long-winded, speech'!)

Some scholars have sensed a connection between "pizza" and "pitta", a type of flat bread widespread in south-eastern Europe. In fact, it is possible that "pitta" reflects a form "petta" or "pitta" encountered in dialects of north-eastern Italy with the same meaning as "pizza", the Gothic equivalent of the Langobard word that gave rise to pizza.

For a more detailed overview of the etymology of pizza, see the article (in Italian) by G. Princi Braccini, in the journal Archivio glottologico italiano, Vol. 64, 1979.