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Comment by unwind | Hacker News Reader

US English speakers consider pizza to be a kind of pie, yes.

It"s quite confusing for the rest of us (or at least to me) but that's how they talk. :)

I wouldn’t say that American English speakers actually consider pizza to be a member of the same pie family as apple pie. We will refer to pizzas as “pies,” but without a very clear context of pizza, “pie” is almost always going to be interpreted as the family of sweet round desserts.

Aha, thanks, that's even more confusing! :) Also interesting (from a sibling comment) to learn that it's regional; I guess I'm suffering from some kind of confirmation bias; whenever US folks who do not call pizzas pies write about pizza online, I don't notice. :)

I think in practice any English speaker even at like an A2 level wouldn’t get confused, because the context has to be extremely clear in order for “pie” to be used in reference to a pizza. In any conceivable case I can think of, pizza is either going to be explicitly named immediately before saying “pie,” or the context will be undeniable (like when you’re ordering from a pizza restaurant). There would never be a case where someone would ask “what do you want to eat?” and someone would respond with “pie” when they mean pizza.

> "There would never be a case where someone would ask “what do you want to eat?” and someone would respond with “pie” when they mean pizza."

Friends or colleagues who are used to eating a pizza together excepted. Maybe rarely someone could say "pepperoni pie" or "cheese pie" without being confused, but as you said the context makes the case in these examples.

It's regional. Most of the country does _not_ call pizza a pie.

I once volunteered for a political campaign in rural Kansas (Senate campaign, IIRC, this was just a local campaign office) and they brought in some young New York political consultant and he called pizza "pie" (it came up because he was ordering some "pies" for the volunteers). The first time he did it everyone looked at one another and started laughing—not to be mean, it was just so unexpected that no-one could help it. I felt kinda bad for him, seemed really taken aback. NOBODY says that in rural Kansas. You don't order a pie, or a pizza pie, you order a pizza.

For most of us in the room it was the first time we'd heard someone in real life call a pizza a pie, except when doing a bad Italian accent and talking about "a pizza-a pie-a" as a joke.

A unit of pizza is a pie. It's not actually a pie.

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