Tomato

How to spell tomato

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce tomato

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tomato mean?

1. nounA round, soft, red fruit eaten raw or cooked as a vegetable.

Tomato in a sentence

• She sliced a ripe tomato for the sandwich.

• The recipe calls for one ripe tomato and a clove of garlic.

Where does tomato come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

The word travelled into English from the Spanish tomate, which the Spanish in turn took from tomatl, a word in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. In Nahuatl the term described the plump, juicy fruit of the plant, and it reached Europe in the 1500s after Spanish contact with Mexico. English speakers reshaped the Spanish tomate into tomato by the 1750s, swapping the final -e for the -o ending that also turns up in potato. For a long time the plant was grown in Europe as an ornamental curiosity and was even suspected of being poisonous, since it belongs to the nightshade family. The lingering spelling trap is the single t in the middle and the plural tomatoes, which insists on an -es ending much like potatoes.

How the word is built

• tomat- (from Nahuatl tomatl, the fruit)
• -o (noun ending adopted via Spanish)