Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

spud

UK/spʌd/US/spʌd/
nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,620 of 15,258neutralinformal · an editor’s judgement

Other forms: spuds

Spud is an informal word for a potato. Warm, cheerful, and thoroughly British.

It belongs to markets, chip shops and kitchens rather than to writing, and jacket spuds is what a café menu says when it is being friendly. The word comes from the name of a narrow spade once used for digging them up, and it moved from the tool to the crop. It is also used as a nickname. Spud gun is a toy that fires small pellets of potato, which nobody under forty seems to remember.

Definitions of spud

  1. 1nounspudA potato.B2+

    “He put a few spuds in the oven.”

Where it comes from

  1. Middle English

    spudde — small knife

  2. English, today

    spud

From Middle English spudde (“small knife”). Origin unknown; probably related to Danish spyd, Old Norse spjót (“spear”), German Spieß (“spear; spike; skewer”). Compare English spit (“sharp, pointed rod”). The use of the term for a potato perhaps first appeared in New

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 10 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

spud in the wild

  • A spud gun or potato gun is a small toy gun used to fire a fragment of potato.

    Spud gun

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.