> my guess is that all those "zucinni" turned up by a search are misspellings!

Twenty pages of mis-spellings! In one of the previous sections - how many citations were needed for to enter a new word in a dictionary.

I accept that in the UK it isn't our word to begin with so it could be a misspelling. I've found almost every variation in cookery books, with the more serious Italian writers using "Zucchine" - which Emanuela tells us is the most common usage in Italy.

Looking at the websites, many of them are Germanic or Scandinavian, so I suspect that this is where the Zuccini spelling originates. Italian is spoken in parts of Switzerland, so there is plenty of opportunity for the languages to merge. Again this is strange as I can't think of many languages outside Italy that use two c's in this way. I'm sure someone on this list will know the answer!