Brains

How to spell brains

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce brains

What does brains mean?

1. nounIntelligence, cleverness, or good practical sense.
2. nounThe mass of nerve tissue inside the skull, or such tissue served as food.
3. nounThe person who plans and directs an operation or organisation.

Brains in a sentence

• The new analyst clearly has the brains for this job.

• The textbook showed how human brains differ from those of other primates.

• Investigators identified him as the brains behind the whole operation.

• It takes both brains and patience to untangle the company accounts.

• The old recipe calls for lamb brains cooked in butter.

• She was the brains of the start-up while her partner handled sales.

Where does brains come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of brain, which descends from the Old English word bragen, meaning the soft grey mass of tissue inside the skull. That word came from a Germanic root shared with the Old Frisian brein and the Dutch brein, and scholars connect it to a wider ancestral sense of 'upper part' or 'top of the head'. For most of its history the word referred strictly to the physical organ, but by the late Middle Ages English speakers were already using it figuratively for the mind, the intellect, and a person's reasoning power. The plural 'brains' developed two everyday lives: it can simply mean the organ as a mass (and the dish made from animal brains), or, informally, it can mean cleverness or the clever person directing a scheme. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, which is why this word rarely trips up an adult writer.

How the word is built

• brain (Old English bragen: the soft mass inside the skull)
• -s (plural)