spaghetti and meatballs
4
1.0
- noun
- /spəˈɡɛti ənd ˈmiːtbɔlz/
:
espagueti con albóndigas
- I'm making spaghetti and meatballs.
- spaghetti and meatballs, his favorite dishes
- spaghetti and meatballs, his favorite
- served spaghetti and meatballs
Chicken and waffles, spaghetti and meatballs, Sonny and Cher, peanut butter and Jelly.
- Chicken and waffles, spaghetti and meatballs, Sonny and Cher, peanut butter and Jelly.
Examples
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That night, Casey dreamed about spaghetti and meatballs.
Fiction book (1998) -
We found out the other day that Mr. Meatball provided the meatballs wholesale to Lombardo's, and that their spaghetti and meatballs frozen meal tastes identical to Lombardo's.
Blog text (24) -
Got some spaghetti and meatballs for ya.
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Glad you like spaghetti and meatballs.
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"All I know about Italian food is spaghetti and meatballs."
Fiction book (1991) -
Growing up, my favorite meal was spaghetti and meatballs.
Blog text (24) -
Spaghetti and meatballs is your favorite dish.
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She cooked spaghetti and meatballs and green Jell-O.
Academic text (2006) -
Queenie and Mother Dear cooked Sister's favorite dishes: spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, anything with oregano.
Fiction book (1990) -
I'm making spaghetti and meatballs for dinner tonight.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase directly denotes a food made of its parts: 'spaghetti' (thin pasta) combined with 'meatballs' (balls of ground meat) joined by 'and', so a learner who knows the constituents will infer it refers to pasta served with meatballs. This is a literal, compositional noun phrase and is cross-linguistically common for naming dishes, making it immediately comprehensible to B1 learners.
Etymology
Spaghetti and meatballs comes from Italian immigrants in America who, one popular story says, put large meatballs on top of long spaghetti and covered them with tomato sauce. So the phrase now means 'a dish of spaghetti served with meatballs'.