Pizzaiuolo, espresso, soprano: the 10 most famous Italian words abroad in 2026 for Treccani

The most common Italian words and that the world knows best are different from what we believe. They are words, or rather Italianisms, that have migrated into other languages, capable over time of consolidating and earning a permanent place in the expressions, customs and daily life of other societies. This is because language is an organic, flexible material, it travels, it never stands still, it crosses borders, it contaminates itself and reinvents itself at every stage.

From coffee to stucco, from tramezzino to sopranothe top ten of the most famous words abroad includes expressions of all types, and from a first look at the ranking it can be seen that they are words closely linked to musical, gastronomic and artistic fields, as told by the project of Treccani Culture Foundation, Waves – Italian words in travelcreated in agreement with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation on the occasion of the Week of the Italian Language in the World 2026. “Italianisms”, explains the press release, “were selected for their ability to tell the moment in which an invention, a technological or artistic transformation imposed its name on the rest of the world”.

The ranking of the 10 most famous Italian words abroad in 2026

1. The word takes first place pizza chefa term that identifies “the craftsman who prepares Neapolitan pizza according to codified and handed down gestures”. UNESCO also contributed to giving international resonance to the voice, in its original Neapolitan version, which in 2017 included The art of Neapolitan Pizzaiuolo in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
2. The words relating to coffee rise on the second and third steps of the podium. Expressed, term attested in Naples as early as 1912, represents, according to the official definition, the “freshly brewed coffeeby passing hot water under pressure through the ground powder.”
3. While mochapatented in 1933 by Alfonso Bialetti, is a name that refers to Mokha, the port in Yemen from which cargoes of coffee once sailed, and is the “pressure coffee maker with the characteristic octagonal shape”.
4. He placed fourth sandwichwhose story begins in 1925 at Caffè Mulassano in Turin. Angela Demichelis rethought the Anglo-Saxon sandwich with Italian ingredients. In fact, the word that tradition traces back to Gabriele d’Annunzio descends from tramezzo, “that which is in the middle”, and is known today as the “triangular sandwich of soft bread without crust, with filling”.
5. The word closes the list jeansa term that few people link to Italy and which instead comes from Gênes, the French name for Genoa. A resistant cotton fabric left from the Ligurian port, the same with which the trousers worn by Garibaldi and the Thousand were made in 1860, today kept in the Central Museum of the Risorgimento. Blue jeans were derived from the phrase bleu de Gênes.

The other words widespread in the world according to Treccani

In the second half of the ranking they follow one another carpaccio, italic, stucco, soprano and falsetto. In the early 1970s, Countess Amalia Nani Mocenigo was forbidden by doctors to eat any cooked meat, and Giuseppe Cipriani, founder of Harry’s Bar in Venice, responded with a dish designed for the occasion, namely “meat served raw and cut into very thin slices“. To baptize it he chose the name of Vittore Carpaccio, the painter whose bright reds were reminiscent of those of the flesh.

The seventh step belongs to English italicwhich in the Anglo-Saxon world designates the “italic typeface“. Its cradle is still Venice, around 1501, when the publisher Aldo Manuzio wanted paperback books and to do this he commissioned the engraver Francesco Griffo to create a more compact and inclined typeface. In eighth place there is stuccoa word that has Germanic roots and which would later enter our vocabulary, spreading throughout Northern Europe, indicating “the mixture of plaster and marble dust with which walls are covered and frames and figures are modeled”.

The last two positions are occupied by soprano and falsetto. Soprano descends from the Latin superanus and means the “highest voice and, by extension, the high register of some instruments”, while falsetto is the “high vocal register with which the male voice exceeds its natural range”, a practice that has its roots in the churches of the 16th century, where singing was forbidden to women and it was up to men to climb up to the highest notes.