Macaroni is machine-made dry commercial pasta, used in contrast to fresh pasta made at home or in small local businesses. It is a corruption of the Italian word maccherone and its plural maccheroni.

Thomas Jefferson is credited with bringing the first macaroni machine to the United States in 1789 when he returned home after serving as ambassador to France. Jefferson credits Mr. Daniel Paese with teaching him all he learned about this machine.

In the United States, the name macaroni is customary given to a specific shape of pasta: small pasta tubes cut into short pieces. This pasta is customarily prepared by baking it with Cheddar cheese or American cheese; the resulting dish is called macaroni and cheese.

However, among Italian-Americans in the mid-Atlantic region (particularly in Philadelphia and New Jersey), macaroni is used as a generic term for any type of pasta.

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In 18th century England, a macaroni was a fashionable man who dressed and even spoke in an outlandishly affected manner. The term pejoratively referred to a person who exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion in terms of clothes, eating and gambling. Young men who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour adopted the Italian word and said that anything that was fashionable or à la mode was 'very macaroni'. The expression was particularly used to characterize those people who dressed in high fashion with stripes and tall, powdered wigs with a little hat on top which was so high that it could only be removed on the point of a sword. Macaronies combined the enjoyment of wine, sex and song with effeminacy of dress.

There was a song from the time of the American Revolutionary War, talking of Yankee Doodle who stuck a feather in his hat and called it Macaroni. This shows that "Macaroni" at the time was a slang term for the most up-to-date of fashions.

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For Macaroni Latin, see Macaronic.