Onion

How to spell onion

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce onion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does onion mean?

1. nounA round vegetable with a pungent flavour, made of concentric layers and used widely in cooking.

Onion in a sentence

• She chopped a large onion for the stew.

• The recipe calls for one finely diced onion and two cloves of garlic.

Where does onion come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Onion comes from the Latin unionem, the accusative of unio, a word that Roman writers used for both a single large pearl and a particular kind of onion. The link in the Roman mind was unity: an onion was seen as a single bulb made of many layers wrapped into one whole, and unio is built on unus, the Latin word for 'one'. The term travelled into English through the Old French oignon during the medieval period, and by the 1100s it had settled into Middle English. That same unus root sits inside the everyday word 'union', so an onion is, etymologically, a vegetable that is many in one. The modern spelling smooths the older French and Latin forms into the simple 'onion', which is why the tricky part for writers is the unstressed 'io' in the middle rather than the opening.

How the word is built

• onion (single, unitary root; from Latin unio 'a single large pearl, a single onion')