Word.ws English Dictionary

how-to

how-to adjective: that gives advice or instruction on a particular topic.

Adjective

how-to (not comparable)

  1. That gives advice or instruction on a particular topic.
    • The Rules is a veritable compost heap of do's and (mostly) don't's for a woman—oops, girl—who wants to master the fine art of womanipulation. It's a how-to book: how to make a man desperate to marry a girl […]2010, Ellen Goodman, Paper Trail: Common Sense in Uncommon Times

Noun

how-to (plural how-tos)

  1. A brief informal description of how to accomplish a specific task.
  2. A book or other guide describing how to accomplish tasks in a certain field.

Forms of how-to

Adjective
alternative formhowto
alternative formhow to
Noun
pluralhow-tos

Origin of how-to

From how + to.

Questions about how-to

What does how-to mean?
How-to means that gives advice or instruction on a particular topic.
What part of speech is how-to?
How-to can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near how-to in the dictionary

  1. how-d'ye-dos
  2. how-de-do
  3. how-de-dos
  4. how-do-you-do
  5. how-do-you-dos
  6. how-to
  7. how-to-vote card
  8. how-to-vote cards
  9. how-tos
  10. howadji
  11. howadjis

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: how-to (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “how-to.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/how-to. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.