To

How to spell to

2 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce to

What does to mean?

1. prepositionExpressing motion or direction toward a place, person, or condition, or marking the infinitive of a verb.

To in a sentence

• She drove to the office before the morning meeting.

• He wanted to finish the report by Friday.

Where does to come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This little word descends directly from Old English 'to', meaning 'in the direction of' or 'toward', which traces back to the Proto-Germanic root that also gave Dutch 'toe' and German 'zu'. The deeper ancestor is a Proto-Indo-European pointing word meaning roughly 'this' or 'toward this', the same family that lies behind several directional terms across European languages. From its earliest English use it marked motion or direction toward a place, and over time it took on the grammatical job of introducing the infinitive form of verbs, as in 'to go'. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years, even as pronunciation softened to a weak schwa in everyday speech. Its real difficulty is not spelling but its trio of homophones: it sits alongside 'too' (also, excessively) and 'two' (the number), and choosing among them is one of the most common adult writing slips.

How the word is built

• to (single Old English root, not decomposable into prefix-root-suffix)

Words that sound like to

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• too: To a higher degree than is desirable or acceptable; or, in addition.
• two: The cardinal number equal to one plus one; the number 2.