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horseradish

/ˈhɔɹsɹædɪʃ/noun

horseradish is a noun meaning “A plant of the mustard family, Armoracia rusticana, cultivated for its edible root” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled H-O-R-S-E-R-A-D-I-S-H and has 3 syllables, and it appears about once in every 2 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of horseradish is horseradishes.

What does horseradish mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A plant of the mustard family, Armoracia rusticana, cultivated for its edible root.

  2. 2

    A pungent condiment made from the root of the plant.

  3. 3

    slangNonsense.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce horseradish?

  • US /ˈhɔɹsɹædɪʃ/
  • UK /ˈhɔːsɹædɪʃ/

Horseradish has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-us-horseradish.ogg, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of horseradish

  • horseradishes plural
  • horse-radish

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is horseradish?

Horseradish appears about once in every 2 million words in written English, the 42,680th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Horseradish in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchraifort (plant), cranson de Bretagne, cran (condiment)
GermanMeerrettich, Kren (plant)
Portugueseraiz-forte (plant)
Spanishrábano picante, rábano rusticano, raíz picante (plant)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does horseradish come from?

From horse + radish.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).