Pepper Definition: Meaning, Uses, and Practice Examples

It is concise, catchy, and it comes up in kitchens and dinner tables with ease.

Pepper refers to a distinct category of plant and spice, so it doesn’t have many true synonyms. Other words are often used in specific contexts, but they aren’t always interchangeable.

Related nouns: spice seasoning chili capsicum

Synonyms (contextual): chili pepper bell pepper paprika (in culinary contexts)

Common collocations: black pepper pepper grinder hot pepper pepper flakes

The pepper description is obvious and the use of this word is wide enough and covers various everyday scenarios.

With adjectives: spicy pepper red pepper crushed pepper sweet pepper

With verbs: grind pepper sprinkle pepper add pepper grow pepper

With nouns (noun + noun): pepper mill pepper seeds pepper plant pepper flakes

Now that we know what the pepper means, let’s turn up the heat with some spicy idioms.

• To pepper someone with questions — To ask many questions quickly and continuously.

    The reporter pepper ed the celebrity with questions the moment she stepped off the plane.

• Pepper and salt — Describes hair that is mixed black and gray, or something speckled with black and white.

    His pepper -and-salt beard gave him a distinguished look.

• To pepper a speech — When you sprinkle anything across a speech or written work, you’re adding a lot of that specific thing.

    Her speech was pepper ed with witty jokes that kept the audience engaged.

You’ve explored the meaning of pepper, now let’s see how well it stuck with a few quick challenges.

Let’s spice up your vocabulary across borders! Here’s how to say pepper in three of the world’s most widely spoken languages:

You may think you are pretty familiar with pepper but it has much more than the crunch and the heat. Now, it is time to unveil some interesting facts that define a pepper.

• The hottest pepper in the world might cause your eyes to water even at a distance of one mile.

  Pepper X, developed by Ed Currie, was designated by the Guinness World Records as the hottest chili pepper with an average heat score of 2.69 million SHU, surpassing the Carolina Reaper by 1.6 million.

• The largest bell pepper weighed in at 966 grams topping the charts.

  The monster pepper is grown by Ian Neale in the UK and was the 2024 National Giant Vegetable Championships winner at the Malvern Autumn Show. The size demonstrates that growing tricks and the proper conditions could lead to record-sized vegetables.

• At one time, pepper was as good as its weight in gold.

  During the Middle Ages, black pepper was a currency. European traders referred to it as the black gold and waged wars over who controlled this most valuable commodity.

• The history of pepper plants dates back thousands of years.

  Originating in Central and South America, peppers have been part of human history since 7500 BC. Columbus and other European explorers mistook these spicy fruits for the familiar black and white peppercorns, which is why they share the name, though their flavors and uses are worlds apart.

To define pepper in full, let’s look at how it’s flavored by language, history, and ideas, because its impact goes far beyond the kitchen.