tempura
Plural: tempuras
Noun
- A Japanese dish of seafood or vegetables lightly battered and deep-fried.
- vegetables and seafood dipped in batter and deep-fried
- A Japanese dish made by deep-frying vegetables, seafood, or other foods in a light batter.
Examples
- He celebrated his Scrabble victory with a plate of TEMPURA.
Origin / Etymology
Borrowed from Japanese 天(てん)麩(ぷ)羅(ら) (tenpura), from Portuguese, ultimately from Latin. Different dictionaries link two different original terms:
* Portuguese tempero (“seasoning”) or tempera (“he/she/it seasons; season!”), third-person present singular or imperative tense of temperar (“to season, to temper”), from Latin temperare (“to mix, to temper”).
* Portuguese têmpora (“Ember days”), from Latin tempora, plural of tempus (“time; period”). When Portuguese explorers (mostly Jesuit missionaries) arrived in Japan, they abstained from eating beef, pork, and poultry during the Ember days, a Catholic series of holidays. Instead, they ate fried vegetables and fish. This was the first contact of the Japanese with fried food, and since then they began associating the Portuguese word têmpora (which they pronounced tenpura) with such food.
Scrabble Score: 11
tempura: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Wordtempura: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
tempura: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary