Chairmen

How to spell chairmen

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce chairmen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does chairmen mean?

1. nounMore than one chairman; the people who preside over committees, boards, or meetings.

Chairmen in a sentence

• The chairmen of both companies signed the merger agreement.

• All the regional chairmen gathered for the annual conference.

Where does chairmen come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of chairman, a compound that joins two words of very different ancestry. The first part, chair, travelled into English through Old French chaiere from the Latin cathedra, which literally meant a seat or bench and is the same root that gives us cathedral, the church that houses a bishop's official seat. By the seventeenth century the chair had become a symbol of the seat occupied by the person presiding over a meeting, so to take the chair meant to lead the proceedings. The second element, man, is a native Old English word, mann, meaning simply a person or human being, and its plural was already men long before the Norman influence arrived. Combined as chairman, the term named the presiding officer of a committee, board, or assembly, and the ordinary English plural pattern man to men carried straight over to chairmen, which is exactly the spelling trap worth remembering: the ending is men, not man.

How the word is built

• chair (seat of authority, from Latin cathedra: seat)
• men (plural of man, from Old English mann: person)