Matita
NOUN [feminine]
Meaning and English translation 🔖
Pencil
🇬🇧 A tool for writing, drawing, or coloring, composed of a lead enclosed in a casing, usually made of wood.
🇮🇹 Strumento per scrivere, disegnare o colorare, composto da una mina racchiusa in un involucro, solitamente di legno.
| Masculine ♂️ | Feminine ♀️ | |
|---|---|---|
| Singular | - | la - una matita |
| Plural | - | le - delle matite |
Example sentences 💬
Ho bisogno di una matita per prendere appunti durante la lezione.
I need a pencil to take notes during the lecture.
L'artista preferisce usare matite colorate per i suoi disegni.
The artist prefers to use colored pencils for her drawings.
This article is brought to you by Giulia School, where you can learn Italian the natural way—with real conversations and passionate teachers guiding you every step of the journey. It’s the closest thing to immersion you can get without living in Italy. Click here to learn more.
Idioms with matita 🇮🇹
Temperare la matita
→ To sharpen the pencil
Ho temperato la matita prima di iniziare il disegno.
I sharpened the pencil before starting the drawing.
Scrivere a matita
→ To write in pencil
Per favore, scrivi a matita così potrai cancellare facilmente gli errori.
Please write in pencil so you can easily erase mistakes.
Essere una splendida matita
→ To be a great sketch artist (especially for cartoons)
Il mio amico è una splendida matita: i suoi fumetti sono fantastici.
My friend is a great sketch artist: his comics are fantastic.
Matita per le labbra
→ Lip pencil
Usa la matita per le labbra per definire il contorno prima di applicare il rossetto.
Use the lip pencil to define the outline before applying lipstick.
Matita per gli occhi
→ Eyeliner (pencil)
La matita per gli occhi nera intensifica lo sguardo.
The black eyeliner intensifies the gaze.
Where does the word matita come from? 🔎
Matita comes from the Latin word haematites, which in turn derives from the Greek αἱματίτης (aimatites). This Greek term literally means "blood-colored stone". The name originally referred to a red stone used for drawing. Over time, the first vowel "a" was dropped, transforming "amatita" into "matita".
Did you know that... 🤓
Impress your italian friends with curious facts about Italy and its culture
The Bloody History of the Pencil
I often wonder about the origins of object names. Does it happen to you too?
Yesterday, I thought that the pen was called "penna" in Italian because, before modern pens, people used bird feathers. So why is a pencil called "matita"? When was it invented? Why are Leonardo's drawings red and not gray?
Here's what I discovered.
There's an iron mineral with a red color that strongly resembles blood, so much so that the ancient Greeks called it "haimaitítes," meaning 'blood-colored' (hâima means 'blood'). Hematite has been used for coloring since antiquity, when people left handprints in caves.
During the Renaissance, hematite was used in sticks or reeds. Its unmistakable blood-like red color led to this pencil being called "sanguigna" (blood-red crayon).
But why do pencils write in gray today? To find out, we need to travel to 16th-century England.
There, the world's first graphite deposit was discovered. However, initially, graphite was used only to mark animals wrapped in cloth or bamboo canes.
It's said that an Italian couple, Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti, had the idea of hollowing out wood - mainly juniper sticks - and enclosing the graphite inside. The result was a flat, oval, and compact pencil.
The modern pencil, with a graphite stick inserted between two halves of wood that are then glued together, was invented in the 18th century between France and Germany, where century-old companies like Conté, Faber-Castell, and Staedtler still exist today.
And that's how a Greek word that referred to a stone passed to a new tool, which has forgotten its red past, but not its importance in art.
