Dries

How to spell dries

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dries

What does dries mean?

1. verbBecomes or makes free of moisture; the third-person singular present form of dry.

Dries in a sentence

• The washing dries faster on a breezy afternoon.

• This paint dries within an hour of the final coat.

Where does dries come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the third-person singular form of the verb 'dry', which descends from the Old English adjective dryge, meaning 'parched' or 'free of moisture'. That word grew out of a Germanic root shared with the Dutch droog and the German trocken, all carrying the same sense of dryness. The verb sense, 'to make or become free of water', developed naturally from the adjective in early English. The spelling trap lives in the ending: because 'dry' finishes in a consonant plus -y, the y turns to -ie before -s, giving 'dries' rather than 'drys', the same rule that turns 'try' into 'tries' and 'fly' into 'flies'. Knowing that consonant-plus-y pattern is the surest way to remember why the word looks the way it does.

How the word is built

• dry (from Old English dryge: parched, withered)
• -s (third-person singular present; the final -y shifts to -ie before the ending)