Cups

How to spell cups

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cups

What does cups mean?

1. nounSmall open containers used for drinking, or the amounts they hold.

Cups in a sentence

• She stacked the clean cups on the top shelf.

• The recipe calls for two cups of flour.

Where does cups come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The singular cup descends from the Old English cuppe, which itself was an early Germanic borrowing of the Late Latin cuppa, meaning a tub or drinking vessel; that Latin form was a variant of cupa, a 'cask' or 'barrel'. The same Latin root branched out across Europe and gave the French coupe and the Italian coppa, so the modern cup has cousins all over the continent. Old English added the regular -s ending to mark the plural, a pattern English has used consistently for more than a thousand years. The spelling is wholly phonetic and has stayed stable, since the short vowel and the simple consonant cluster leave no silent letters or doubling to trip a writer.

How the word is built

• cup (drinking vessel)
• -s (plural suffix)