Comes

How to spell comes

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce comes

What does comes mean?

1. verbThird-person singular present of 'come': moves toward, arrives at, or reaches a place, state, or result.

Comes in a sentence

• The train comes in at six every morning.

• Her confidence comes from years of steady practice.

Where does comes come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is simply the third-person singular present form of the verb 'come', which descends from the Old English cuman, meaning 'to move toward, approach, or arrive'. That verb traces back through a shared Germanic ancestor to the same root that gave German 'kommen' and Dutch 'komen', all carrying the plain idea of movement toward a place or person. The unusual spelling, with a silent final 'e' and a vowel that sounds like 'uh' rather than the 'o' on the page, is a leftover from medieval scribal habits, when the letter 'o' was often written instead of 'u' next to letters like 'm' and 'n' to keep the cramped handwriting legible. The same quirk explains the spelling of relatives such as 'some', 'son', and 'done'. Because the word is so common and so old, its irregular look has simply been frozen into English.

How the word is built

• come (root, from Old English cuman: to move toward)
• -s (third-person singular present verb ending)