Potty

How to spell potty

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce potty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does potty mean?

1. nounA small bowl or low toilet used by a young child being toilet trained.
2. adjectiveSlightly mad, foolish, or foolishly enthusiastic about something.

Potty in a sentence

• noun

  The toddler proudly sat on the potty for the first time.

• adjective

  He went completely potty over the new sports car.

• noun

  We keep a spare potty in the boot for long car journeys.

• adjective

  The neighbours think she is a little potty for talking to her plants.

Where does potty come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows directly from the old English noun 'pot', a rounded vessel whose roots run back through Germanic languages and possibly Late Latin 'pottus', a drinking or cooking vessel. The familiar '-y' ending is a diminutive, the same friendly, shrinking suffix found in 'doggy' and 'kitty', so a potty was originally just a 'little pot'. By the nineteenth century the term had narrowed to mean the small, low chamber pot used by a young child, and it remains the standard nursery word today. The adjective sense, meaning slightly mad or foolishly devoted to something, arose separately in British slang around 1900, perhaps from the idea of something being trivial or small (a 'potty little' matter) and from there extending to a person of small or addled wits. The doubled 't' is the spelling trap: because 'pot' has a single short vowel, adding '-y' demands the consonant be doubled to keep that vowel short.

How the word is built

• pot (vessel)
• -y (diminutive/adjective suffix)