Word.ws English Dictionary

on to

on to preposition: upon; on top of.

Preposition

on to

  1. Upon; on top of.
    • My cat just jumped on to the keyboard.
  2. (informal) Aware of.
    • The thought-police were on to my plans of world domination.
    • Fortunately “the F.B.I. was on to them” and foiled the plot, but the alleged kidnapping conspiracy, Walter argues, is a harbinger of worse to come.2022 January 12, Ross Douthat, “Let’s Not Invent a Civil War”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
  3. Used to indicate, or signpost, logical progression to a new topic in a talk or discourse.
    • Now. On to the system of active water uptake.
    • Let's go on to item 3 in the list.

Forms of on to

alternative formonto

Questions about on to

What does on to mean?
On to means upon; on top of.
What part of speech is on to?
On to is a preposition.

Words near on to in the dictionary

  1. on threes
  2. on tick
  3. on tilt
  4. on time
  5. on tiptoe
  6. on to
  7. on top
  8. on top of
  9. on top of one's game
  10. on top of that
  11. on top of the world

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: on 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.

Last updated:

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