Italian Pasta Names

Within the Italian language there are a number of adjectives that describe particular pasta shapes. Corta or mezza means short; festonata or riccia, ruffled; fina, thin or fine; grande, big; grossa, thick or fat; liscia, smooth; lunga, long, and rigata, ridged. Kitchen Italian is also rich in suffixes. For example, thin spaghetti is spaghettini. Other diminutives to describe small pasta are -cino, -ello and -etto. The suffix -oni means the opposite; thus spaghettoni are thick strands of spaghetti.