Pinto

How to spell pinto

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pinto

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pinto mean?

1. nounA horse marked with large irregular patches of white and another colour.
2. nounA mottled beige and brown bean, common in Mexican and southwestern cooking.

Pinto in a sentence

• The ranch hand saddled a brown and white pinto for the morning ride.

• She soaked a cup of dried pinto overnight before making the chilli.

• Every spotted pinto in the corral had its own distinctive markings.

• The recipe called for mashed pinto folded into the warm tortillas.

Where does pinto come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word comes straight from Spanish pinto, an adjective meaning 'painted', 'mottled', or 'spotted'. It traces back through Spanish pintar, 'to paint', to the Latin verb pingere, which literally meant 'to paint or to embroider' and which also gave English the words 'picture', 'pigment', and 'paint' itself. American English borrowed pinto in the 1800s from Mexican Spanish, particularly in the cattle and horse country of the American Southwest, to describe a horse marked with large irregular patches of white and another colour, as if dabbed on with a brush. The same idea of being 'spotted' explains the pinto bean, which is mottled beige and reddish-brown before cooking. Because the word is simply the foreign adjective adopted whole, the ending stays -o rather than any English suffix, which is the small detail writers occasionally second-guess.

How the word is built

• pinto (from Spanish pinto: painted, spotted), past participle of pintar (to paint)