Beet

How to spell beet

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce beet

What does beet mean?

1. nounA round root vegetable, often deep red, eaten cooked, pickled, or grown for sugar.

Beet in a sentence

• She grated a raw beet into the salad for colour.

• The farmer harvested a field of sugar beet for the refinery.

Where does beet come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Beet comes from the Old English bete, which named the same edible root plant we know today and was itself borrowed early from the Latin beta, the Roman word for the beet. The Latin term may ultimately echo a Celtic source, though that link is uncertain, so the trail beyond Latin is fuzzy. For centuries the plant was grown chiefly for its leaves and its swollen root, and only later did varieties such as the sugar beet and the deep red garden beet become familiar. Because the word entered English so early and stayed close to its Latin form, the spelling has stayed steady, but it has become a notorious homophone of beat. The clean double e of beet conveniently mirrors the round red root, which can help separate it from the verb beat.

How the word is built

• beet (whole root word from Old English bete, a beet plant; no prefix or suffix)

Words that sound like beet

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• beat: To strike something repeatedly, or to defeat an opponent in a contest.