Ditches

How to spell ditches

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ditches

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ditches mean?

1. nounNarrow channels dug into the ground, usually to carry away water.
2. verbGets rid of or abandons something or someone, usually abruptly.

Ditches in a sentence

• noun

  Heavy rain filled the roadside ditches within minutes.

• verb

  He often ditches his plans the moment something better comes along.

• noun

  The farmer cleared the muddy ditches before the wet season.

• verb

  She usually ditches her old phone as soon as a new model arrives.

Where does ditches come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English dic, which meant a dug-out channel or trench and, oddly, also the bank of earth thrown up beside it. The same root gave us the word 'dike' (or 'dyke'), so a ditch (the hollow you dig out) and a dike (the wall you build up) are really two halves of the same original idea, separated only by which side of the spadework you focused on. The Old English term has Germanic relatives across the North Sea, including the Dutch dijk, source of the modern engineering term for sea defences. The figurative verb sense, meaning to throw something away or abandon it, grew from the literal act of tossing unwanted things into a roadside ditch, and it took firm hold in the twentieth century, including aviation slang for forcing an aircraft down onto water. The spelling keeps the tidy '-tch' that English uses after a short vowel, and the plural simply adds '-es' because the word already ends in a hissing sound.

How the word is built

• ditch (Old English dic: a dug channel or bank)
• -es (plural/third-person ending)