potato
Americannoun
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potatoes
plural
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Also called white potato. Also called 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:
You can’t help but grin at Sessa’s hoot when his scrawny Tony finally manages to muscle a raw potato through a french-fry slicer.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2026
“Every potato batch you get is going to be different,” said Cedrik Neike, member of the Managing Board and CEO Digital Industries at Siemens.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 5, 2026
Get ready for his return with, courtesy of my colleagues, some good advice on potato salad, parenting, and pricey underwear.
From Slate ● Aug. 4, 2026
Marcona almonds are lovely if you want an amusing high-low dialogue with the potato chips that appear later, though any salted roasted almond will do.
From Salon ● Jul. 30, 2026
“You haven’t lived until you’ve eaten Nicole’s sweet potato pie.”
From "Storm Runners" by Roland Smith
We walk on, through a field of potatoes, the plants shrivelled to nothing and lying brown on the soil.
From BBC ● Aug. 6, 2026
More than 200 parameters go into creating the “perfect Pringle,” from the flour’s particle size and the dough’s humidity to the geography where the potatoes were harvested, according to Laenen.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 5, 2026
It turns out it’s not what you mix into the dish that makes it delicious—it’s how you cook the potatoes.
From Slate ● Aug. 4, 2026
These measurements helped reveal how water escaped from the potatoes and how oil entered the spaces it left behind.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 29, 2026
There are cooks in black T-shirts, frying eggs and potatoes on sizzling griddles.
From "The Wrong Way Home" by Kate O’Shaughnessy
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.
