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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

onto.

Arriving upon or on top of (speaking of a physical or metaphorical movement).

4 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

prep/ˈɒn.tuː/Received-Pronunciation/ˈɑn.tu/Northern-US, cot-caught-merger/ˈɔn.tu//ˈɔn.tʉ/Northern-Ireland, Scotland
  1. Arriving upon or on top of (speaking of a physical or metaphorical movement).

    My cat just jumped onto the keyboard.
    A new drug has just come onto the market.
  2. Aware of.

    informal
    The thought-police were onto my plans of world domination.
  3. Being an onto function with a codomain of (see below).

    The exponential function maps the set of real numbers onto the set of positive real numbers.
Where this word comes from

From on + to, after into. Compare Saterland Frisian antou (“up to”).

adj/ˈɒn.tuː/Received-Pronunciation/ˈɑn.tu/Northern-US, cot-caught-merger/ˈɔn.tu//ˈɔn.tʉ/Northern-Ireland, Scotland
  1. Attaining each of the values in its codomain; having its image equal to its codomain.

    not-comparable
    Considered as a function on the real numbers, the exponential function is not onto, as it never takes on values less than or equal to zero.
Where this word comes from

From on + to, after into. Compare Saterland Frisian antou (“up to”).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.