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tomato

UK/təˈmɑː.təʊ/US/təˈmeɪ.toʊ/
nounA1Common in everyday speech and writing · #3,394 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: tomatoes

A tomato is a soft round red food used in salads and ketchup. Sliced tomato, tomato sauce, grow tomatoes.

It is a fruit botanically and a vegetable in the kitchen, and an American court ruled it a vegetable in 1893 for tariff purposes. Refrigerating one destroys the flavour compounds and they do not come back. The word came through Spanish from Nahuatl.

Softeis · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of tomato

  1. 1nountomatoA soft round red fruit eaten as a vegetable.A1

    “She sliced a tomato and added it to her sandwich.”

tomato is a food.

Where it comes from

Spanish tomate comes from Nahuatl tomatl. The final o came later, perhaps by analogy with potato.

  1. azc-nah-pro

    *toma-

  2. nci

    tomatl

  3. Spanish

    tomate

  4. English, today

    tomato

Variant of earlier tomate, from Spanish tomate, from nci tomatl, from azc-nah-pro toma-. Compare tomatillo.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Food & Drink

Practise this word

tomato in the wild

  • Tomato sauce can refer to many different sauces made primarily from tomatoes.

    Tomato sauce

  • Many formerly independent genera like Lycopersicon (the tomatoes) and Cyphomandra are now included in Solanum as subgenera or sections.

    Solanum

  • A BLT is a type of sandwich, named for the initials of its primary ingredients, bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

    BLT

  • Simple variants include using different types of lettuce or tomatoes, toasting or not, or adding mayonnaise.

    BLT

  • A 1903 article in the New-York Tribune on the food of Italian-Americans described a "pomidore pizza", or tomato pie, made solely with dough, tomatoes, and powdered red pepper.

    Italian tomato pie

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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.