Food & drinkMyths & disputes

pho

Phở is probably the last syllable of a street cry for beef rice noodles, ngưu nhục phấn, the Sino-Vietnamese form of a Cantonese name; it appeared around Hanoi in the 1900s, reached France with colonial Vietnamese, and spread through America and the world with refugees after 1975.

Weakest linkPossible

The story you may have heard

That pho comes from French feu, as in pot-au-feu. Many Western sources (Etymonline among them) still say so, but Wiktionary calls it a folk etymology and several scholars of Vietnamese dispute it.

The road to English

From Vietnamese to French

From English to American English

From Vietnamese to Japanese

1900Cantonese

Hops are evenly spaced; labels show the year each form is first attested.

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