Saucer

Saucer

Noun · /ˈsɔːsə/ · a shallow dish on which a cup is placed; also a disc-shaped object resembling that dish

Definition

A saucer is a small, shallow, round dish with a slightly raised rim, designed to sit beneath a teacup or coffee cup. It catches drips and provides a stable resting surface for the cup. Beyond its literal meaning as tableware, saucer has given English the compound flying saucer — the popular name for a disc-shaped unidentified flying object, coined in 1947 — making it one of the few domestic objects to generate its own independent cultural and linguistic legacy. In everyday British English, the cup-and-saucer pairing is a fundamental symbol of formal or traditional hospitality.

Origin

From Old French saussiere, a container for sauce, from sauce (from Latin salsa, meaning salted). The saucer originally referred to a small dish for holding sauce at the table, not a cup-holder. Its application to the small dish placed under a teacup developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as tea-drinking culture spread from Asia to Europe. The sense of the flying saucer dates precisely to 1947, when American pilot Kenneth Arnold described unidentified objects he saw as flying like saucers skipping across water.