Talking Pasta: Spaghetti Vs. Linguine Vs. Fettuccine

Pasta is one of the simplest meals to toss together, while also being one of the most satisfying and easy to make. And on any given day, you probably have at least three or four boxes of dried pasta in assorted shapes and sizes filling your cupboard.

But no matter how often you cook with noodles, it’s easy to get tripped up when a recipe calls for one type of pasta and you have another, similar-but-different type on hand.

Three of the most frequently compared? Spaghetti vs. linguine vs. fettuccine. Here, we break down what you should know about each of these slurpable, carby delights.

Spaghetti

Most famous for: Spaghetti and Meatballs

How it's shaped: Perhaps the most popular pasta shape in the U.S., strands of spaghetti are shaped like tiny tubes (in Italian, "spaghetti" means "small strings"). Made with durum wheat and water and sometimes eggs, this style of pasta comes from Sicily. Spaghetti is narrow and cylindrical, but not too thin—shrink your tubes too much, and it turns from spaghetti to angel hair. If you were to make homemade spaghetti noodles, you’d need a pasta maker to achieve the necessary thinness.

Best served with: The long, round strands of spaghetti are best served with smoother, lighter sauces like marinara, carbonara, pesto, and cacio e pepe—anything thicker will have difficulty sticking to the cylindrical noodle.

Linguine

Most famous for: Linguine With Clam Sauce

How it's shaped: Imagine you had a tiny, tiny rolling pin. If you laid a strand of spaghetti on a cutting board and used your tiny rolling pin to flatten it, you would have linguine. Translating to "little tongues" in Italian, linguine noodles are mostly flat with a whisper of a curve (similar to the shape of a tongue). Made with flour and water, linguine comes from Genoa in northwest Italy. Like spaghetti, these are long noodles ideal for twirling and slurping and are thin enough that you’d need a pasta maker to create them at home.

Best served with: Linguine is an incredibly versatile noodle. It’s thin, like spaghetti, so it works with all the same light sauces. But because it is also flat, it holds up well to thicker sauces, too, such as cream- or butter-based sauces. The popular dish Linguine with Clams features a simple yet flavor-packed sauce made from oil, butter, garlic, lemon, and parsley; the linguine noodles grab the tasty sauce and won’t go sliding off your fork as you pry the clam from its shell. It’s also perfect for Shrimp Scampi for the same reason.

Fettuccine

Most famous for: Fettuccine Alfredo

How it's shaped: With origins in both Rome and Tuscany, fettuccine is made with eggs and flour. If linguine and spaghetti are essentially the same size, fettuccine is in the next weight class. Meaning "little ribbons" in Italian, fettuccine noodles are wider than linguine and perfectly flat, though just as long. Fettuccine is so wide, in fact, that you’d no longer need a pasta maker to make it at home—traditionally, fettuccine is made by rolling the pasta dough out flat and cutting the fettuccine strands by hand. Just don’t cut them too wide, because you might accidentally make pappardelle instead.

Best served with: Wide, flat fettuccine is perfect for creamy sauces like lush, cheesy alfredo or a creamy tomato or vodka sauce. Since the noodles have more surface area, it’s easier for heavier sauces to adhere and make it to your mouth.

When Can You Substitute?

As a rule of thumb, try not to jump more than one pasta shape away when looking for substitutions. So if your recipe calls for spaghetti and you don’t have any, linguine will work just fine but fettuccine will likely be too thick.

For recipes that use linguine, either spaghetti or fettuccine can serve as a stand-in. And for dishes that use fettuccine, linguine should get by fine, but spaghetti won’t be able to hold the sauce the same way. You can also swap in even larger noodles, like tagliatelle, which is a few millimeters wider than fettuccine.

You don't necessarily want to substitute longer pasta for smaller shapes, though. Smaller pastas, like farfalle, along with tubed, twisted, or shelled shapes, like macaroni, penne, cavatappi, or orecchiette, can sometimes work better in meals like pasta salads, soups, or baked dishes, like baked ziti.