Case

How to spell case

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce case

What does case mean?

1. nounA particular instance, situation, or set of circumstances.
2. nounA box, sheath, or protective container for holding or carrying something.
3. nounA legal action or matter decided in a court of law.

Case in a sentence

• In this case the warranty does not cover accidental damage.

• She packed her glasses into a padded case before the flight.

• The lawyer spent months preparing the case for trial.

• The manager reviewed each case on its own merits before deciding.

• He ordered a case of wine for the celebration.

• The judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence.

Where does case come from?

Language of origin: Latin

English actually merged two different Latin words under one spelling, which is part of what makes 'case' so versatile. The sense meaning a situation, instance, or matter comes from the Latin casus, literally 'a falling' or 'a chance happening', built on the verb cadere 'to fall'; the idea was that a 'case' is how things happen to fall out, an occurrence, and from there a legal matter brought before a court. This passed into English through Old French 'cas' in the 1200s. The quite separate sense of a box or container comes from Latin capsa, a chest or holder for books, which gave Old French 'casse' and English 'case' for any protective enclosure. Grammarians later reused the casus word to name grammatical 'case', translating the Greek notion of how a noun 'falls' into different forms. The two unrelated roots ended up spelled identically, which is why one short word covers everything from a court case to a suitcase.

How the word is built

• case (single morpheme; from Latin casus 'an occurrence' and, for the container sense, Latin capsa 'box')