Tomatoes

How to spell tomatoes

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce tomatoes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tomatoes mean?

1. nounMore than one tomato, the round red fruit eaten as a vegetable in salads, sauces, and sandwiches.

Tomatoes in a sentence

• The recipe calls for two tins of chopped tomatoes and a clove of garlic.

• She grew rows of tomatoes along the sunny side of the garden.

Where does tomatoes come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

This is the plural of tomato, a word English borrowed from the Spanish tomate in the late 1500s and early 1600s. The Spanish themselves took it from tomatl, a word in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, where it described the swelling, juicy fruit of the plant. Early English writers experimented with forms like tomate and even the now obsolete spelling 'tomata' before tomato settled in. The plural keeps the older convention that many everyday nouns ending in -o add -es rather than just -s, which is exactly where the spelling trap lies: it is tomatoes, not 'tomatos'. The same -oes pattern shows up in its frequent companion potatoes, another word that travelled into English from Spanish out of the Americas.

How the word is built

• tomato (the fruit, from Nahuatl tomatl)
• -es (plural ending used after a final -o)