Crises

How to spell crises

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crises

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crises mean?

1. nounThe plural of crisis: more than one moment of acute danger, difficulty, or decisive turning point.

Crises in a sentence

• The company weathered two financial crises in a single decade.

• A string of staffing crises left the hospital short of nurses.

Where does crises come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is the plural of crisis, which English took directly from the Greek word krisis, meaning 'a decision', 'a judgement', or 'a turning point'. That noun grew from the verb krinein, meaning 'to separate, sift, or decide', the same root that lies behind 'critic', 'criterion', and 'discriminate'. In ancient medicine the krisis was the decisive moment in an illness when the patient would either recover or worsen, and that sense of a pivotal turning point carried through into Latin and then into English in the 1500s. Because the word kept its Greek shape, it also kept the Greek plural pattern in which a singular ending in -is becomes -es, so crisis becomes crises and is pronounced 'KRY-seez', not 'KRY-sis-iz'. The spelling trap is precisely this swap of the final i for an e, since the singular and plural look almost identical on the page.

How the word is built

• cris- (from Greek krisis: a decision, turning point)
• -es (irregular Greek-style plural of -is)