macaroni

Macaroni comes from Italian maccaroni, plural of maccarone, an archaic word meaning "fool." Its deeper roots are uncertain — some trace it to late Byzantine Greek makaría ("food made from barley"), itself from mákar ("blessed"), while others link it to maccare, meaning "to bruise or crush," from Latin maccāre.

In Italian the word carried a sense of foolishness or bumpkinish simplicity, tied to a humble food. In English, though, the fop sense of "macaroni" seems to have come not from that Italian association but from the British Macaroni Club; the word was also once used to calque a term for clipped colonial coinage.

Macaroni is a doublet of macaron, both descending from the French word macaron — so the pasta and the delicate almond cookie share the same linguistic root.