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OneKitly

pepperoni

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//pɛpəˈɹəʊni//
  • United States//pɛpəˈɹoʊni//

A spicy salami-style Italian-American sausage made from cured pork and beef seasoned with pepper.

noun

  1. 1

    A spicy salami-style Italian-American sausage made from cured pork and beef seasoned with pepper.

    He gave the dog a treat — a dried up skinny, turdy looking, pepperoni sausage.

    She and her two best friends are choreographing a number for the talent show; she’s applied to California Institute of the Arts; and she flirts unabashedly with a cute pizza server. (The better to land a couple of extra pepperonis on her slice without an upcharge.)

  2. 2

    Pizza with only tomato sauce, cheese and pepperoni toppings.

    Yo, Tony, gimme a slice of pepperoni and a coke.

    There's far more than just hot dogs to feast on too. The pizzas—gigantic, floppy, with a hyperreal waxy sheen—are mythic. They arrive exclusively in cheese, pepperoni, or supreme—the holy trinity—and will run you an eminently affordable $1.99 for a ridiculously huge wedge-shaped slice.

Etymology

Borrowed from Italian peperoni (“bell peppers”), the plural of peperone (“bell pepper”).

Forms

plural
pepperonis
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).