Baths

How to spell baths

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce baths

What does baths mean?

1. nounMore than one bath; tubs, washes in water, or public bathing facilities.

Baths in a sentence

• The new flat has two baths and a separate shower.

• The old Roman baths near the spring still draw thousands of visitors.

Where does baths come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word bath comes from the Old English bæth, meaning a place or vessel for washing the body, and it traces back to a Germanic root shared with the verb to bathe and with related forms in Dutch (bad) and German (Bad). The deeper sense was tied to warmth and heat, since the earliest baths were associated with warm water rather than mere immersion. By adding the plural ending -s, English forms baths to mean more than one bath, whether tubs in a house or the public bathing complexes that the Romans made famous. The same ending also produces the third-person verb form, as when one person baths another. The spelling stays simple because both halves are native English, yet the trap lies in pronunciation: the th can be voiced and the vowel shifts between British and American speech, which can tempt writers toward odd respellings even though the letters never change.

How the word is built

• bath (Old English bæth: a wash, a soaking)
• -s (plural / third-person verb ending)