Curtains

How to spell curtains

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce curtains

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does curtains mean?

1. nounPieces of fabric hung to cover a window or to divide a space.
2. nounInformally, the end of something, especially failure, ruin, or death.

Curtains in a sentence

• She drew the curtains to block out the morning light.

• If the bank refuses the loan, it is curtains for the business.

• The new curtains matched the colour of the sofa perfectly.

• One more missed deadline and it could be curtains for the whole project.

Where does curtains come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Late Latin cortina, which named a hanging cloth or screen and may itself be linked to the idea of an enclosed court or space. It passed into Old French as cortine, a piece of fabric used to shut off or conceal a part of a room, and English borrowed it in the early 1300s. The spelling settled with -tain rather than the -tin you might expect from the Latin and French roots, which is part of what makes it a quiet trap: the ending sounds like a flat schwa, not the bright vowel the letters suggest. From the literal cloth at a window, English later extended it to the cloth that opens and closes a theatre stage, and from there to the figurative sense of a final ending, as in the phrase that something is curtains for someone. The plural simply adds -s to the singular curtain.

How the word is built

• curtain (a hanging panel of cloth)
• -s (plural)