Buses

How to spell buses

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce buses

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does buses mean?

1. nounMore than one large road vehicle that carries passengers along a fixed route.
2. verbTransports people by bus, or clears used dishes from tables in a restaurant.

Buses in a sentence

• noun

  Three buses pulled up at the stop within a single minute.

• verb

  The district buses pupils across town to balance enrolment.

• noun

  The city replaced its diesel buses with electric models last year.

• verb

  The new hire buses tables during the busy dinner shift.

Where does buses come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of bus, which is itself a clipping of the Latin word omnibus, meaning 'for all' or 'for everyone'. Omnibus was the dative plural of omnis, 'all', and it was adopted in early nineteenth-century France for a public horse-drawn carriage that anyone could ride. English took the word over in the 1820s and quickly trimmed the long Latin form down to the snappy bus, keeping only its final syllable. When the plural was needed, English added a simple -es to give buses, though a doubled-s form, busses, did circulate for a time and survives chiefly as an old word for kisses. The single-s buses is now the standard plural, and remembering that the root is one tidy syllable helps explain why only one s belongs before the ending.

How the word is built

• bus (the vehicle, shortened from omnibus)
• -es (plural/third-person ending)

British and American spelling

Buses is the British spelling. American English spells it busses.