paste [ME] Pasta [M19th], pasty [ME], and paste all go back through Latin to Greek pastai ‘barley porridge’ from pastos ‘to sprinkle, to salt’. The earliest use of paste in English was to mean ‘pastry’; pastry took over the sense in the 15th century. The sense ‘glue’ emerged in the later Middle Ages from the use of flour and water as an adhesive. Pasty, the adjective, ‘resembling pastry, doughy’ is from 1607. Other words from the same root are pastel [E17th]; patty [M17th]; and the French equivalent paté [M18th]. Italian developed the form pasticcio for ‘pie’, which was also used as a term for a ‘hotchpotch, mixture’ and came into English via French as pastiche in the late 19th century.