Toothpaste

How to spell toothpaste

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce toothpaste

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does toothpaste mean?

1. nounA soft paste used with a brush to clean the teeth.

Toothpaste in a sentence

• She squeezed the last of the toothpaste onto her brush.

• The supermarket had a sale on mint toothpaste and mouthwash.

Where does toothpaste come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound formed from two much older words: tooth and paste. Tooth descends from the Old English toth, a native Germanic word for the hard structures in the mouth, related to the Latin dens and Greek odous that gave us 'dental' and 'orthodontic'. Paste came into English in the late fourteenth century from the Old French paste, which in turn came from the Late Latin pasta, meaning a soft dough or paste (the very same root that gives us the Italian 'pasta'). The two words were joined to name the cleaning preparation as commercial dental cream replaced earlier tooth powders in the nineteenth century. The spelling is wholly regular once you remember it is simply tooth plus paste run together with no letters dropped at the join.

How the word is built

• tooth (the dental organ)
• paste (a soft semi-solid mixture)