Beans

How to spell beans

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce beans

What does beans mean?

1. nounThe edible seeds of various pod-bearing plants, eaten as a vegetable or pulse.

Beans in a sentence

• She added a tin of beans to the chilli.

• The recipe calls for soaking the dried beans overnight.

Where does beans come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'bean', which comes straight from the Old English bēan, the native Anglo-Saxon name for broad beans and similar edible seeds long before kidney beans or coffee beans were known in Britain. It belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close relatives such as the Dutch 'boon' and the German 'Bohne', all tracing back to an old Germanic root for the swollen seed of a pod-bearing plant. The spelling settled with the 'ea' vowel during the development of Middle English, and that 'ea' simply reflects the long 'ee' sound we still say today. Over time the word stretched far beyond the garden: 'coffee beans', 'jelly beans', and the dismissive phrase 'not worth a bean'. Because the word is short, common, and phonetically regular, the only thing worth noting is that the long vowel is written 'ea' rather than 'ee'.

How the word is built

• bean (Old English bēan: the edible seed)
• -s (plural suffix)