Bones

How to spell bones

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bones

What does bones mean?

1. nounThe hard pieces of tissue that make up the skeleton of a person or animal.
2. verbRemoves the bones from meat or fish (third person singular).

Bones in a sentence

• noun

  The dog buried two bones in the back garden.

• verb

  The chef carefully bones the trout before plating it.

• noun

  The museum displayed the fossilised bones of a dinosaur.

• verb

  She always bones the chicken thighs before grilling them.

Where does bones come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word comes from the Old English ban, meaning the hard tissue that forms the skeleton, a word shared across the early Germanic languages, with close relatives such as the Old Norse bein and the Dutch been (which can mean both 'bone' and 'leg'). The spelling drifted from ban to bon and finally to the modern 'bone' as English vowels shifted over the medieval centuries, and the silent final 'e' is a leftover marker that the vowel is long. The plural simply adds '-s', giving 'bones', and the same ending serves the verb 'to bone', meaning to remove the bones from meat or fish. Curiously, the figurative senses are old too: to 'feel something in your bones' and to 'make no bones about' a matter both date back several centuries. Because the word is short and phonetically regular, the only mild trap is remembering the silent final letter before the plural ending.

How the word is built

• bone (from Old English ban: bone)
• -s (plural or third-person verb ending)