Airs

How to spell airs

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce airs

What does airs mean?

1. nounAffected or pretentious manners adopted to seem more important or refined than one really is.
2. verbBroadcasts, expresses openly, or exposes to fresh air (third-person singular of the verb 'air').

Airs in a sentence

• noun

  She puts on airs to seem wealthier than her neighbours.

• verb

  The station airs the evening news at six o'clock.

• noun

  His snobbish airs irritated everyone in the office.

• verb

  She always airs her opinions at the family dinner table.

Where does airs come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Greek aer, meaning the lower atmosphere or the air we breathe, which passed into Latin as aer and then into Old French as air before reaching English in the 1200s. The plain meaning was the invisible gas around us, but by the 1500s the word had picked up a figurative sense of a person's manner or bearing, the impression they gave off, much as we still speak of an air of confidence. From that came the dismissive plural airs, the affected manners someone adopts to seem grander than they are, recorded from the 1700s. A separate musical sense, an air meaning a tune or melody, arrived through Italian aria, itself from the same Latin root. The spelling trap is purely aural: airs sounds identical to heirs (people who inherit) and to errs (makes mistakes), so the meaning of the sentence is the only guide to the right spelling.

How the word is built

• air (from Latin aer: the atmosphere)
• -s (plural noun / third-person singular verb ending)