Carrots

How to spell carrots

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce carrots

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does carrots mean?

1. nounTapering orange root vegetables eaten cooked or raw.

Carrots in a sentence

• She chopped the carrots into thin sticks for the salad.

• The soup needed more carrots and a little less celery.

Where does carrots come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the French carotte, which English adopted in the late 1500s. French in turn took it from the Latin carota, and that was borrowed from the Greek karoton, the name of the plant. Many scholars connect karoton with the Greek keras, meaning 'horn', a nod to the tapering, horn-like shape of the root. The familiar bright orange variety is actually a relatively modern development, since older carrots were often purple, white, or yellow. The single t and the doubled r are the spelling points to watch, and it helps to remember that carrots share their homophone sound with carats and karats, which are spelled quite differently.

How the word is built

• carrot (root, the vegetable)
• -s (plural)