Plural of "tomato" and "potato"

In My Humble Opinion
1

Airman and I engaged in some discussion of a handwritten sign that I saw this afternoon. The sign says “Sorry, we’re out of Tomatoes!” (That’s verbatim.) I was so impressed with this burst of unexpected literacy that I took a picture of it and posted it to Facebook.

I, of course, know that the plural of “tomato” is “tomatoes”. Airman, on the other hand, feels that the plural of “tomato” can be “tomatos”. The OED, for what it’s worth, backs him up, but to me, that just looks wrong.

This is not a “who’s right” thing, because the OED does show “tomatos” as an alternate plural. This is more of a “How do most people do it?” thing.

2

You can spell it tomatos in the same way you spell hobos. It’s your choice. That’s what America is about: choice.

3

Never ever heard or seen it as “tomatos”…always spelled it (and seen it) as “tomatoes”.

4

The plural of to-MAY-to is to-MAH-to.

5

You left off the correct choice: “Let’s call the whole thing off!”

6

I spell it tomatoes and potatoes if someone else will see it so I don’t get sucked into an argument about it but in stuff that’s for my eyes only I have too much respect for E to whore her out like that.

7

The rule is to add es if the o is preceded by a consonant. There are 80 million uses of “tomatoes” on Google, but only 2.3 million uses of “tomatos.” Also, every spell check I’ve used counts the latter as spelled incorrectly.

8

It should be “tomatoes” and “potatoes” - like the words “heroes” and “tornadoes”. Unfortunately though, as we all know, if enough people spell a word wrongly for a long enough period of time, sooner or later it becomes accepted as being correct.

But I vow to keep spelling these words the way they’re supposed to be!

9

Problem with “tomatos” is that it looks like the last syllable should be pronounced “-toss” instead of “-toes”.

10

Both ways are correct, but -oes is preferred.

11

Potato’s and Tomato’s

What?

~os looks wrong to me (despite what the dictionaries say) - makes the writer look less than fully literate, IMO.

12

The plural of tomato is tomatoes.
The plural of potato is spuds.

Seriously, I try to avoid writing the plural of potato because I can never quite remember if it has an e or not. I don’t want people to think I’m as stupid as Dan Quayle, so I either write spuds or look it up. Writing spuds is a lot easier. Oddly, I never have much trouble remembering that tomatoes has an e. Maybe that’s because until I was about 15 years old I was convinced the singular had an e: tomatoe.

13

‘Tomatos’ refers to the fruit, ‘tomatoes’ refers to the vegetable, and ‘tomatose’ refers to the sugar.
I’m not sure if ‘potatoes’ follow the same rule, but I would assume that it possibly does for the vegetable and sugar, but not for the fruit since potato is clearly not a fruit. Although the plant itself does produce fruit.

14

Tomatos. Looks like a Greek word.

15

For the digits on Marisa’s nether limbs, the plural is Tomei toes.

16

Tomatoes - but I wouldn’t capitalise the word unless it was at the beginning of a sentence. It’s not a proper noun as far as I’m aware.

17

As in “Dory-toss”, the well known corn chip.

18

"Problem with “tomatos” is that it looks like the last syllable should be pronounced “-toss” instead of “-toes”. "
That’s what it looks like to you? Tomatoss? The t-o-m-a-t-o part didn’t give you any clue as to pronunciation?

19

There’s no good reason to add a “e”.

20

I just buy them one at a time. Issue avoided.