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| | World Wide Words: Lasagne |
 | | However, Nick Shearing, one of the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary, having paused only to restore his eyebrows to their normal position, found within minutes of reading the story that the first mention of lasagne in Italian was in a work of 1281, a century before it was supposedly invented in England. |
 | | It derives from the Vulgar Latin lasania for a cooking pot, though its insalubrious origins are said to in the older Latin lasanum for a chamber pot (though I am told that Italian etymologists prefer to find an origin in the classical Greek lagana, a type of unleavened flat bread not unlike pasta). |
 | | Lasagne, by the way, is the Italian plural of lasagna, meaning one piece of this type of pasta; Brits employ the plural form both for the pasta and the dish made from it, while Americans usually plump for the singular in both cases. |
| www.worldwidewords.org /topicalwords/tw-las1.htm (570 words) |
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