I didn’t try orzo, the little grain-shaped pasta made from durum wheat and semolina flour, until my mid-twenties.

All those wasted years! I eat it weekly now ― it’s perfect for midweek meals like tray bakes and slow cooker dishes, because it’s really good at turning excess juices and liquid into a flavourful hydrator.

But to be honest, I thought it was a grain all of its own until I realised it’s simply chopped-up pasta dough.

And while that was an incorrect assumption, it turns out the food’s name is actually closer to that meaning than it is to its true form.

In English, it means the little pasta we all know and love.

But literally translated from the word’s native Italian, orzo means “barley.”

If you’re wondering what the Italians use to describe “barley,” I’m afraid I have some confusing news ― it’s still “orzo,” as this pearl barley-infused zuppa di orzo (barley soup) recipe shows.

However, orzo (meaning barley) can be split into perlato (pearl) and mondo (hulled) kinds in Italian. Pasta Evangelists say that the food is also sometimes referred to as risoni in Italy.

To make things even more baffling, Italia Outdoors Food and Wine write: “In Friuli Venezia Giulia, a very typical regional dish is a ‘risotto’ made with barley, or orzo, called orzotto.”

This can be “confusing” to outsiders, the site reads, often leading non-Italians to inaccurately recreate the region’s dish with orzo instead of barely ― meanwhile, other areas of Italy make the dish with the mini pasta instead.

On top of all that, food site The Mediterranean Dish explains that orzo is called arpa şehriye, or “barley noodle”, in Turkish; piñones, meaning “pine nuts”, in Spanish; and kritharáki, translated as “little barley”, in Greek.

The (somewhat brutal, but nonetheless true) comments under a Reddit post about the topic sarcastically point out that pappardelle, which means butterfly, pasta does not, in fact, flap off of our plates.

Nor, the netizens of r/iamveryculinary point out, do orecchiette (meaning “ears”) listen to us eating them.

To which I say, fair enough ― but those aren’t the same! This would be like calling potato chips “parsnip strips”, rather than naming a light and fluffy cake “fairy cake” ― this is food-on-similar-food, rather than food-on-similar-non-food, confusion!