tempura

Meaning

Noun

• A Japanese dish made by deep-frying vegetables, seafood, or other foods in a light batter.

Origin

• Borrowed from Japanese 天麩羅, from Portuguese, ultimately from Latin. Different dictionaries link two different original terms:
• Portuguese tempero ("seasoning") or tempera, third-person present singular or imperative tense of temperar, from Latin temperare ("to mix, to [[temper#Verb").
• Portuguese têmpora ("{{w")}}, from Latin tempora, plural of tempus. When Portuguese explorers (mostly Jesuit missionaries) arrived in Japan, they abstained from eating beef, pork and poultry during the Ember days, a Catholic series of holidays. Instead, they ate fried vegetables and fish. This was the first contact of the Japanese with fried food, and since then they began associating the Portuguese word têmpora (which they pronounced tenpura) with such food.