>>>>Rotonda is, AFAIK, the Italian for the original building. The name has become a sort of generic name for any similar building, including the one Jefferson built in Charlottesville - which is also spelled with an U.
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>>From the latin rotundus = round.
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>>Rotunda can refer to a round building, usually with a dome, or to a round room. The church I attended as a child had a large, round room (with no dome) that was called the rotunda.
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>Hmmm. You might have known from my exchanges with Dragan I'm a bit of a language enthusiast, and the chances of my not knowing this were slim :-)
>
>Back in the 70's, at the height of "The Troubles" in N. Ireland, I was at art college in Birmingham (England). My bank was in a multi-storey cyllindrical building called "The Rotunda". That building was bomb-attacked, along with a pub that I frequented at the weekend. I'll never forget what a rotunda is.
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>Luckily, I was away at sea with the Merchant Marine at the time. I felt as if the bombs had been meant for me!
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>>Rotund is an interesting variation, usually referring to someone's shape, and is a "nice" substitution for "fat," as in:
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>>The rotund gentleman's belly indicated that he had eaten too much jelly.
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>You think we've never read any Dickens? :-)
>
>BTW, by "jelly" do you mean that which wobbles and comes from a mould, or a fruit preserve you spread on bread. I think what to us is jelly, to you is jello, and what to you is jelly to us is jam. :-)
>
>As, I think, Oscar Wilde said: "Two countries separated by a common language"

Well, we have jam, jelly, and Jello. Not to mention marmalade (which personally, I detest). I'm not entirely sure of the difference between jam and jelly, but in general I think jam is fruit boiled with sugar, and jelly is fruit juice boiled with sugar. Jello is really a brand name.

Finally, marmalade is a sort of jelly with fruit rind suspended in it in order to make it decorative and inedible. Marmalade and Christmas cake are distantly related fake foods. Christmas cake, however uses pieces of brightly coloured plastic in lieu of actual fruit and buries them in a dense cake-like substance to be used as a very festive looking doorstop. If you are lucky enough to have two of them, you can use them as bookends. They've been known to last longer than the pyramids.