Carrot

How to spell carrot

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce carrot

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does carrot mean?

1. nounA long, tapering orange root vegetable eaten cooked or raw.
2. nounA promised reward used to encourage someone to act.

Carrot in a sentence

• She grated a carrot into the salad for colour and crunch.

• The manager dangled a bonus as a carrot to hit the deadline.

• The recipe calls for one diced onion and one chopped carrot.

• The policy offered a tax break as a carrot for early payment.

Where does carrot come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes ultimately from the Greek karoton, the name for the cultivated root vegetable, which may be linked to a root meaning 'horn' because of the plant's tapering, horn-like shape. It passed into Latin as carota and then into Middle French as carotte, and English borrowed it in the late 1500s as the orange root became a common kitchen vegetable. The spelling kept its doubled 'r' and final 'ot' from the French form, which is the part that trips writers up. It is worth remembering that carrot is a near-homophone of 'carat' (the gem and gold measure) and 'caret' (the proofreading mark), all unrelated in origin, so the vegetable is the one with the double 'r' and double 't' look. The figurative phrase about offering a 'carrot' as an incentive only became common in English in the nineteenth century.

How the word is built

• carrot (single root, no affixes; from Greek karoton via Latin and French)

Words that sound like carrot

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

• carat: A unit of weight for gemstones, equal to 200 milligrams.