Taco

How to spell taco

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce taco

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does taco mean?

1. nounA Mexican dish of a folded or rolled tortilla filled with seasoned meat, beans, cheese, or vegetables.

Taco in a sentence

• She ordered a chicken taco from the food truck.

• Every taco on the menu came with fresh salsa and lime.

Where does taco come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This word comes straight from Mexican Spanish taco, where it originally meant a plug, a wad, or a small bite of food, possibly extended from an older sense of a roll or stopper used to block a hole. Spanish itself may have taken the underlying notion from a Germanic source meaning a peg or board, although the food sense is firmly Mexican. By the late 1800s taco described a folded or rolled tortilla filled with meat or beans, the meal that miners and labourers carried for a quick midday bite. English picked the word up across the southern United States border in the early twentieth century and it spread worldwide with Mexican cuisine. Because it is a clean phonetic loan, the spelling is refreshingly simple, just the way it sounds, with no hidden letters to trap the writer.

How the word is built

• taco (a single, unanalysable root borrowed whole from Mexican Spanish)