onto

prep

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.”

   “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.”

2. (informal)Aware of.

   “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.”

adj

1. (not-comparable)Attaining each of the values in its codomain; having its image equal to its codomain.

   “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.”