Digs

How to spell digs

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce digs

What does digs mean?

1. verbBreaks up, turns over, or removes earth or material, typically with a tool or the hands.
2. nounInformal British term for rented accommodation or lodgings.
3. nounAn archaeological excavation site or organised effort to uncover buried remains.

Digs in a sentence

• verb

  Every spring he digs the vegetable bed before planting.

• noun

  She found cheap digs near the university for her first term.

• noun

  The team returned to the digs at dawn to brush away more soil.

• verb

  The dog digs a deep hole under the back fence.

• noun

  The touring actors stayed in shabby digs above the pub.

• noun

  Funding for the summer digs ran out before they reached the lower layers.

Where does digs come from?

Language of origin: Other

The base word 'dig' first appears in Middle English as 'diggen', meaning to break up and turn over earth with a tool. Its deeper origin is genuinely uncertain: scholars suspect a link to Old French 'diguer', meaning to make a dike or trench, which would tie it to the family of words around 'dike' and 'ditch'. Over time the simple farming and labouring sense broadened so that people could 'dig' for treasure, for facts, or for buried remains, which is how the noun 'digs' came to mean an archaeological excavation. The informal British sense of 'digs' for rented lodgings grew separately in the nineteenth century, probably from the idea of a place where one 'digs in' and settles. The spelling stays refreshingly regular: the single short vowel keeps the hard 'g', and the plural or verb ending is just a plain '-s'.

How the word is built

• dig (root verb: to break up or turn over ground)
• -s (plural noun ending or third person singular verb ending)