Toast

How to spell toast

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce toast

What does toast mean?

1. nounSliced bread browned and crisped by heat.
2. nounA call to raise glasses and drink in honour of someone or something.
3. verbTo brown food by heat, or to drink in honour of someone.

Toast in a sentence

• noun

  He spread butter and marmalade on a slice of toast.

• noun

  The best man proposed a toast to the happy couple.

• verb

  She likes to toast the bagels until they are golden.

• noun

  The café serves poached eggs on toast every morning.

• noun

  She raised her glass and offered a toast to her retiring colleague.

• verb

  The guests stood to toast the newly promoted manager.

Where does toast come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin verb torrere, meaning 'to parch, scorch or dry by heat', whose past participle was tostus, 'roasted'. That root travelled into Old French as toster, 'to roast or grill', and English borrowed it in the 1300s for the act of browning bread before a fire. The drinking sense arrived much later, in the 1600s, from the old custom of dropping a piece of spiced or toasted bread into a cup of wine to improve its flavour; raising a glass 'to' a person came to be called a toast because the company drank to someone the way they once drank to the floating bread. The same torrere root still warms the word 'torrid', used for scorching heat, which is a neat reminder that toasting is fundamentally about applied heat. The spelling stayed pleasingly simple, with the long 'oa' doing the work and no silent traps.

How the word is built

• toast (from Latin tostus: parched, dried by heat)