potato
Americannoun
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potatoes
plural
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Also called white potato, Irish potato. the edible tuber of a cultivated plant, Solanum tuberosum, of the nightshade family.
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the plant itself.
noun
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Also called: Irish potato, white potato.
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a solanaceous plant, Solanum tuberosum, of South America: widely cultivated for its edible tubers
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the starchy oval tuber of this plant, which has a brown or red skin and is cooked and eaten as a vegetable
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any of various similar plants, esp the sweet potato
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slang a delicate or awkward matter
Usage
Plural word for potato The plural form of potato is potatoes. The plurals of several other singular words that end in -o are also formed this way, including tomato/tomatoes and echo/echoes. In some cases, the plurals of words that end in -o that are adopted from another language can be formed by adding either -es or -s, as in mosquito/mosquitoes/mosquitos or mango/mangoes/mangos. However, this is not the case with potato/potatoes. Potatos is an invalid spelling of the plural of potato.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of potato
First recorded in 1545–55; from Spanish patata “potato,” variant of batata “sweet potato,” from Taíno
Explanation
The potato is a mighty tuber! You can find it baked, mashed, or fried, among other things, in kitchens the world over. Potato, which comes from the Spanish word patata, originally meant "sweet potato." Potatoes have been around for quite awhile. If you'd lived in the Andes 1800 years ago, you might have been eating potatoes ever since (though you might be sick of them by now). Remember that the plural form of this starchy vegetable ends in "toes."
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The useful motive is the one everyone thinks of first: I need that potato peeler.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 29, 2026
The small restaurant serves Somali food, and I get the same thing every time I visit: goat mendi, with fall-apart bone-in goat served over deeply seasoned rice studded with crispy bits of potato and raisins.
From Salon ● Sep. 8, 2026
Or, if you prefer softer spuds, Danny also has a genius tip for leveling up your potato salad.
From Slate ● Sep. 4, 2026
She’s even preparing her dinners in advance—medium-rare steak and salmon with sweet potato on the side.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 28, 2026
The potato fields were covered with purple blossoms now, and stone walls zigzagged up and down between.
From "Nory Ryan’s Song" by Patricia Reilly Giff
Those savings are not small potatoes: The skin substitutes cost taxpayers billions, and the figure has risen dramatically since before the pandemic.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 5, 2026
Building on last week’s lesson, this soup starts in the oven, where carrots, sweet potatoes, scallions, miso, hot honey and a deliberately assertive amount of spice get deeply caramelized before ever meeting the stockpot.
From Salon ● Oct. 5, 2026
Last month, he said the Silpo store where he shops had no potatoes, cereals or many vegetables.
From Barron's ● Sep. 27, 2026
Meat tends to be most expensive, while potatoes and rice are on the cheaper side.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 26, 2026
We held our breath as Granda lifted up the small potatoes, then patted them under the earth again.
From "Nory Ryan’s Song" by Patricia Reilly Giff
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
