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pad thai (păd tī, päd)
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n.
A Thai dish of rice noodles stir-fried with egg, peanuts, bean sprouts, and various other vegetables and seasonings, often with shrimp, tofu, or chicken.
[Thai phat thay : phat, fried, fried dish + thai, Thai (so called because the dish was introduced in the 1930s as a replacement for popular Chinese dishes of fried wheat noodles as part of the campaign of the nationalistic government of Thai prime minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram (1897-1964) to encourage the use of rice noodles and remove the Chinese elements from Thai culture). The English spelling of pad with d reflects a system of transliteration of the Thai alphabet in which the Thai letter do dek, pronounced d at the beginning of syllables and unreleased t at the end of syllables, is consistently transliterated as d.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
 

Indo-European & Semitic Roots Appendices

    Thousands of entries in the dictionary include etymologies that trace their origins back to reconstructed proto-languages. You can obtain more information about these forms in our online appendices:

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