Echoes

How to spell echoes

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce echoes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does echoes mean?

1. nounSounds that are reflected off a surface and heard again after the original sound.
2. verbRepeats a sound by reflection, or repeats and reinforces an idea or sentiment.

Echoes in a sentence

• noun

  The empty stairwell sent back faint echoes of our footsteps.

• verb

  Her report echoes the concerns raised by earlier reviewers.

• noun

  The cave amplified every shout into ringing echoes.

• verb

  The gymnasium echoes with the noise of the crowd.

Where does echoes come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek ekho, meaning a returned or repeated sound, and in Greek mythology Echo was a mountain nymph condemned to repeat only the last words spoken to her. The Greek noun passed into Latin as echo and then travelled through Old French before settling into English in the late 1300s. From the start it carried both the literal sense of a sound bouncing back off a surface and the figurative sense of one thing repeating or imitating another. The hard 'k' sound spelled with 'ch' is the fingerprint of its Greek ancestry, the same pattern seen in chorus, chaos, and character. The spelling trap lives at the end: words ending in a consonant plus -o usually take -es in the plural, which is why it is echoes rather than echos.

How the word is built

• echo (from Greek ekho: a returned sound)
• -es (plural and third-person-singular ending after final -o)