October is National Pasta Month. Folks eager to roll out their dough might want to first noodle around with this question: when do you call it pasta and when do you call it noodles?

Etymologists can't dish up a lot of history about the word noodle. They do know that the English noodle, which first appeared in the late 1700s, is adapted from the German Nudel. They also know that there is no connection between the food paste noodle and the noodle that names your noggin. Although noodles can come in a variety of shapes and sizes, in the U.S., they most commonly appear shaped as ribbons.

Pasta comes in a much greater variety of shapes than noodles. The Late Latin pasta meant "dough" or "paste." When English speakers borrowed the term from Italian in the late 1800s, they applied it to both paste in processed form, such as spaghetti or macaroni, and to fresh-paste dough, such as ravioli. These days, pasta refers to food made primarily from wheat flour and water.

Although the term noodle is sometimes used interchangeably with pasta, noodle is the term of choice when you're talking about food pastes with noticeable egg content. By the way, the pasta terms spaghetti, ravioli, and macaroni are all descriptive terms from Italian. Spaghetti developed from the word for "string"; ravioli comes from a dialect term meaning "little turnip"; and macaroni was borrowed from another dialect term meaning "dumpling" or "small cake."