Tori

How to spell tori

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tori

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tori mean?

1. nounPlural of torus: doughnut-shaped surfaces, or the rounded convex mouldings at the base of a column.

Tori in a sentence

• The geometry lecture compared two tori to show how their holes differed.

• The restorers cleaned the rounded tori at the foot of each marble column.

Where does tori come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'torus', taken directly from Latin where torus meant a bulge or swelling, and also a rounded cushion, a couch, or the raised bank of earth at the edge of a field. Roman architects borrowed the word for the large convex moulding that rings the base of a column, because it bulges out like a stuffed cushion. From there it passed into the technical vocabulary of mathematics, anatomy, and botany, always keeping the underlying idea of a rounded, ring-like or swollen form; the doughnut-shaped surface studied in geometry is the most familiar example. Because the singular ends in the Latin '-us', the plural follows the Latin pattern and changes that ending to '-i', giving 'tori' rather than an English '-es' plural. The spelling trap is that it looks and sounds close to 'torii', the quite separate Japanese word for a shrine gateway, which carries an extra 'i'.

How the word is built

• tor- (Latin torus: bulge, swelling, rounded moulding)
• -i (Latin masculine plural ending)