onto
/ˈɑn.tu/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.77 in modern English
4
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
2
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
prep
Arriving upon or on top of (speaking of a physical or metaphorical movement).
prep
Being an onto function with a codomain of (see below).
Example Sentences
- "My cat just jumped onto the keyboard."
- "A new drug has just come onto the market."
- "Private-equity nabobs bristle at being dubbed mere financiers. Piling debt onto companies’ balance-sheets is only a small part of what leveraged buy-outs are about, they insist. Improving the workings of the businesses they take over is just as core to their calling, if not more so. Much of their pleading is public-relations bluster."
- "That original list of 2,315 solutions was embedded in the game’s code. That means the game was playable offline and could be downloaded onto phones or computers. The solutions to the original Wordle game were predetermined through October 20, 2027. The New York Times (NYT) hasn’t said if it plans to make any more changes or additions to that initial list."
- "The thought-police were onto my plans of world domination."
- "The exponential function maps the set of real numbers onto the set of positive real numbers."
Etymology
From on + to, after into. Compare Saterland Frisian antou (“up to”).
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈɑn.tu/
- British English: /ˈɒn.tuː/