Boys

How to spell boys

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce boys

What does boys mean?

1. nounMore than one boy; male children or young men.

Boys in a sentence

• The two boys raced their bikes down the hill.

• All four boys joined the same football team this season.

Where does boys come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is simply the plural of 'boy', formed with the regular English plural ending -s. The singular 'boy' appeared in Middle English around the 1300s, where it first meant a male servant or a knave, a rough or low fellow, before it softened to mean a male child. Its deeper origin is genuinely murky; one likely line traces it to an Old French word for a fellow in chains or a servant, ultimately perhaps from a Latin term for a shackle, but scholars have never settled the matter. Because of that uncertainty the word's earlier sense of 'servant' survives faintly in phrases like 'the office boy'. The spelling trap is never the letters themselves but the apostrophe: the plain plural 'boys' takes no apostrophe, unlike the possessive 'boy's' or 'boys''.

How the word is built

• boy (young male)
• -s (plural suffix)