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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

sauce.

A liquid (often thickened) condiment or accompaniment to food.

5 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/sɔːs/Received-Pronunciation/soːs/Australia, British, New-Zealand, Southern, Standard/sɔs/[sɔə̯s]New-York-City, Philadelphia

  1. A liquid (often thickened) condiment or accompaniment to food.

    countable · uncountable
    apple sauce; mint sauce

  2. Tomato sauce (similar to US tomato ketchup), as in

    Australia · India · New-Zealand · UK · countable · uncountable

  3. Alcohol, booze.

    countable · slang · uncountable
    Maybe you should lay off the sauce.

  4. Vitality; capability or talent.

    countable · slang · uncountable
    It's over for that guy. He lost the sauce.

  5. Anabolic steroids.

    countable · uncountable

  6. A soft crayon for use in stump drawing or in shading with the stump.

    countable · uncountable

  7. Cheek; impertinence; backtalk; sass.

    countable · dated · uncountable

  8. Vegetables.

    US · countable · obsolete · slang · uncountable

  9. Any garden vegetables eaten with meat.

    UK · US · countable · dialectal · obsolete · uncountable
Where this word comes from

PIE word *sḗh₂l From Middle English sauce, from Old French sause, from Vulgar Latin *salsa, noun use of the feminine of Latin salsus (“salted”), past participle of saliō (“to salt”), from sal. Doublet of salsa. For the meaning development compare Ancient Greek ἥδυσμα (hḗdusma) ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *swéh₂dus (whence also English sweet).

verb/sɔːs/Received-Pronunciation/soːs/Australia, British, New-Zealand, Southern, Standard/sɔs/[sɔə̯s]New-York-City, Philadelphia

  1. To add sauce to; to season.

  2. To cause to relish anything, as if with a sauce; to tickle or gratify, as the palate; to please; to stimulate.

  3. To make poignant; to give zest, flavour or interest to; to set off; to vary and render attractive.

  4. To treat with bitter, pert, or tart language; to be impudent or saucy to.

    colloquial

  5. To send or hand over.

    slang
Where this word comes from

PIE word *sḗh₂l From Middle English sauce, from Old French sause, from Vulgar Latin *salsa, noun use of the feminine of Latin salsus (“salted”), past participle of saliō (“to salt”), from sal. Doublet of salsa. For the meaning development compare Ancient Greek ἥδυσμα (hḗdusma) ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *swéh₂dus (whence also English sweet).

noun/sɔːs/Received-Pronunciation/soːs/Australia, British, New-Zealand, Southern, Standard/sɔs/[sɔə̯s]New-York-City, Philadelphia

  1. Alternative form of source, often used when requesting the source of an image or other posted material.

    Internet · alt-of · alternative
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.