Toaster

How to spell toaster

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce toaster

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does toaster mean?

1. nounAn electrical kitchen appliance that browns slices of bread by heating them.

Toaster in a sentence

• The bread popped up the moment the toaster finished.

• She unplugged the toaster before cleaning the crumbs out.

Where does toaster come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word is built from the verb 'toast' plus the instrument suffix '-er', which English routinely attaches to a verb to name the machine that performs the action. 'Toast' itself comes from the Latin verb torrere, meaning 'to parch, scorch or dry by heat', whose past participle was tostus, meaning 'parched' or 'roasted'. English took the word through Old French toster, meaning 'to grill or roast', during the 1300s, when 'toast' first meant simply browning bread by the fire. The drinking sense, raising a glass to someone's health, grew from the old custom of dropping a piece of spiced toast into wine. The electrical kitchen appliance we now call a toaster arrived only after the early 1900s, but the name was assembled from these much older parts. The spelling is regular: keep the silent 'a' from 'toast' and end cleanly in '-er', not '-or'.

How the word is built

• toast (to brown by heat, from Latin tostus 'parched, roasted')
• -er (agent/instrument suffix denoting the device that does the action)