tomato

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for tomato is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /təˈmɑː.təʊ/. Corpus data places it at rank #8,997 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 5 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.

Our generated misspelling index lists 8 likely wrong-spelling variants for tomato, with forms such as "otmato", "tmoato", and "toamto". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 4 confusable-pair relationships, "tonto", "tomcat", "toma", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.

Etymologically, the entry records: Variant of earlier tomate, from Spanish tomate, from Classical Nahuatl tomatl, from Proto-Nahuan *toma-tl. Compare tomatillo. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is tomato, spelled T-O-M-A-T-O, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.