Copies

How to spell copies

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce copies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does copies mean?

1. nounMore than one reproduction or duplicate of a document, book, or other item.
2. verbReproduces or imitates something (used with he, she, or it).

Copies in a sentence

• noun

  The office printed thirty copies of the contract for the meeting.

• verb

  He always copies the spreadsheet onto a backup drive before editing.

• noun

  She kept two copies of the report in separate folders.

• verb

  The new intern copies every habit of her manager.

Where does copies come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin copia, which literally meant 'abundance' or 'plenty', the same root that survives in 'copious'. In medieval Latin the phrase used in legal and scholarly settings shifted the sense toward 'the right to transcribe' and then to the transcribed text itself, so a 'copy' came to mean a written reproduction made when paper and ink were precious. English borrowed the noun through Old French 'copie' in the 1300s, and the verb 'to copy' followed soon after. The plural and the third-person verb form both take '-es' because the base word ends in a consonant plus 'y', which flips to 'ie' before the ending; this spelling rule is exactly why 'copies' is written with 'ie' rather than 'ys'. The journey from 'abundance' to 'duplicate' makes sense once you picture a scribe producing many identical texts.

How the word is built

• copy (from copia: abundance, plenty)
• -es (plural/third-person ending after y to ie)