Diaries

How to spell diaries

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce diaries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does diaries mean?

1. nounBooks in which people record daily events, appointments, or personal reflections.

Diaries in a sentence

• The historians studied the soldiers' wartime diaries for first-hand accounts.

• Both managers checked their diaries before agreeing on a meeting time.

Where does diaries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin diarium, which meant a 'daily allowance', especially the daily ration of food or pay given to soldiers and servants. That noun was built directly on dies, the Latin word for 'day', the same root that gives us 'diurnal' and, by a longer route, 'journal'. By Roman times diarium had also come to mean a daily written record, and English borrowed the singular 'diary' in the late sixteenth century with that journal-keeping sense. The plural follows the regular English rule for nouns ending in a consonant plus -y, where the y changes to i before -es, which is exactly the spelling trap: it is 'diaries', not 'diarys'. Remembering the dies 'day' root also helps fix the opening 'dia-', since a diary is a record of one's days.

How the word is built

• diar- (from Latin diarium: daily journal, from dies 'day')
• -ies (plural of a noun ending in -y)