Potato

How to spell potato

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce potato

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does potato mean?

1. nounA starchy edible tuber grown underground and used as a staple vegetable.

Potato in a sentence

• She peeled one large potato for the evening meal.

• The recipe calls for a single baked potato per person.

Where does potato come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

The word arrived in English in the mid-1500s from the Spanish patata, which itself blended two indigenous Caribbean words encountered by early Spanish explorers. The Taino people of the Caribbean called the sweet potato batata, and Spanish speakers fused this with the Quechua word papa, used in the Andes for the ordinary white potato. For a time English used 'potato' for the sweet potato, and only later did it settle on the familiar tuber we now grow across cooler climates. The spelling trap lives in the ending: the singular has no 'e', yet the plural takes one (potatoes), a quirk it shares with tomato and hero. Because the final vowel is an unstressed schwa, writers sometimes hesitate over that closing 'o', even though the singular form is reliably spelled with a plain '-to'.

How the word is built

• potato (a single borrowed root, from Spanish patata; no productive prefix or suffix)