Word.ws English Dictionary

olla

/ˈɒlə/

olla noun: a cooking-pot or earthenware jar used in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries.

olla: a cooking-pot or earthenware jar used in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries
Image: Eric Polk, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

olla (plural ollas)

  1. A cooking-pot or earthenware jar used in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries.
    • On top of the counter were three clay jars or ollas. Two of them were empty but the third was covered with the tin lid from a lardpail and the lid was notched to accommodate the handle of an enameled tin dipper.1992, Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy; 1), New York, N.Y.: Alfred A[braham] Knopf, →ISBN
  2. A pot used for cooling water by evaporation in Latin America.
  3. An unglazed earthenware pot, buried to provide slow steady irrigation.
    • An olla (which literally means “pot”) is a round, unglazed terra cotta clay pot with a long neck that you fill with water and bury next to your plants. It irrigates in the ground.2019 March 1, Mary Kathryn Dunston, “Archived copy”, in Farmer's Almanac, archived from the original on 26 Sep 2020
  4. (Ancient-Rome) A cinerary urn.

Proper noun capitalized: Olla

Olla

  1. A town in Kwara State, Nigeria.

Forms of olla

pluralollas

Origin of olla

Borrowed from Spanish olla, from Latin ōlla, aulla; akin to Sanskrit उखा (ukhā, “pot”), and probably also Gothic 𐌰𐌿𐌷𐌽𐍃 (auhns, “oven”).

Phrases with olla

Words that rhyme with olla

Questions about olla

What does olla mean?
Olla means a cooking-pot or earthenware jar used in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries.
What part of speech is olla?
Olla can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce olla?
Olla is pronounced /ˈɒlə/.
What is the plural of olla?
The plural of olla is ollas.

Words near olla in the dictionary

  1. Olkowski
  2. Olkowskis
  3. Olks
  4. OLL
  5. oll korrect
  6. olla
  7. olla podrida
  8. olla podridas
  9. Ollague
  10. Ollagüe
  11. ollah

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: olla (page history and authors); Olla (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-olla.wav.

Cite this entry: “olla.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/olla. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.