Food words on screen: pizza beats paella

Pizza is said between 19.8 and 34.1 times per million words in all eight sets of film and television subtitles we counted. Paella is said less than once per million in each of the seven where it can be counted, Spanish included: in Spanish subtitles pizza is said 33 times as often as paella. Pizza also out-mentions every national dish we checked in that country's own language. And beer is said more often than wine in French, Italian, Portuguese and German.

Updated 15 October 2026 · 8 min read

Pizza in eight languages

Pizza is one of the few food words that needs no translation: it is spelt pizza in seven of the eight languages, and Mandarin writes the sound as 披萨 or 比萨. It is said most in Brazilian Portuguese and Italian subtitles and least in Mandarin, but the spread among the seven European-language lists is narrow.

Set beside four other dishes that travelled:

Pizza beats the hamburger in seven languages out of eight. The exception is Mandarin, where 汉堡 (hànbǎo) is ahead of pizza. Spaghetti and sushi are each said far less often than pizza, and paella is last in every row that has it. Why English says pizza so easily is part of Italian words used in English, where it ranks first.

Pizza against each country's own dishes

The fairer test is at home: each country's own famous dishes, counted in its own language, against pizza in the same subtitles.

Pizza wins every row. The closest any national dish comes is German sausage, counted as Würstchen and Wurst together. Italy's own spaghetti, lasagne and risotto all trail pizza in Italian. Two rows are ceilings: baguette is also a wand and a chopstick in French, and Spanish taco has several other meanings, one of them "swear word".

Why paella loses in Spanish

This is a count of what is said on screen, not of what people eat. Most subtitles in every language except English are translations of English-language films and series, and the lists do not record which. When characters in an American film order a pizza, the Spanish subtitle says pizza. Nobody in that film orders a paella.

So the table measures the menu of film and television, which is largely an American one, read in eight languages. That is still worth knowing for a learner: it is the vocabulary you will actually meet if you learn from films. It is not evidence about Spanish kitchens.

The staples: meat, eggs, cake

Ten everyday foods, with the highest in each row in bold:

Meat is the most-said of the ten in Spanish, Italian and both kinds of Portuguese, where carne does the work. German's top word is eggs, French's is cake, and English and Mandarin have fish and 鱼 first. Salad is last in all eight.

Several of these counts are ceilings, because the word has another job:

• English fish is also a verb, and chicken is also an insult.
• Spanish huevos is also slang, and carne is "flesh" as well as "meat", in Italian and Portuguese too.
• German Ei and Eier have slang uses too, and Salat can mean a mess.
• Mandarin 鸡 and 蛋 are in many compounds and insults, and 肉 is "flesh".

Rice, pasta and potatoes are left out on purpose. Spanish pasta is also slang for money, Italian riso is also "laughter", Spanish papa is also "pope", and those second meanings are common enough to spoil the count.

Beer vs wine

Beer is ahead of wine in six of the seven languages where the two can be compared, including French and Italian, though in French the two are almost level. English is the one where wine leads, and only just. Spanish cannot be called at all: vino is "wine", and it is also "he came", "she came" and "you came", a very common verb form.

The same caution applies as for pizza. A beer in a bar is a staple of American film, and the subtitles carry it into every language. Coffee against tea, counted the same way, is in love or money, dogs or cats: what films say most.

What was counted as each food

Hamburger counts each language's own word and its plural, with burger where subtitles use it; Mandarin pizza counts 披萨, 比萨 and 比萨饼; wine in Mandarin counts 葡萄酒 and 红酒. Esperanto is not included, because its subtitle corpus is only 403,882 words.

For learners

Food words are not among the commonest in any language: pizza is around rank 2,551 in Spanish dialogue and 2,528 in French. But they are the words you need on the first day of a trip, and a course that follows a frequency list strictly would reach them late. That is the limit of frequency as a guide: food vocabulary is worth learning out of order.

The words themselves are in the frequency lists for Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German and Mandarin, and Verbavia (our own course) teaches each language from that list, free on the web. For a cuisine these corpora do not cover, see Shanghainese food words. Words that went the other way, into English, are in Spanish words used in English and French words used in English.

One drink has the same name almost everywhere, in two forms: tea and chai. Why is in words that are the same in every language.

Sources

• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. Every count is computed by scripts/frequency_screen.py and printed from its output rather than typed: each word's count, with the forms listed above added up, divided by the total of all counts in that language's list.
• Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española: taco (among its senses, colloquially, a swear word).