Entities

How to spell entities

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce entities

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does entities mean?

1. nounThings that have a distinct, separate, and independent existence, including organisations or beings.

Entities in a sentence

• The contract treats the two companies as separate legal entities.

• The database stores customers and suppliers as different entities.

Where does entities come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'entity', which comes from the Late Latin entitas, meaning 'being' or 'existence'. That noun was coined from ens, the present participle of the Latin verb esse, meaning simply 'to be', so an entity is literally 'a thing that is'. Medieval philosophers used entitas as a technical term when they wanted to talk about anything that has real existence, whether physical or abstract. English took the word up in the late sixteenth century, at first in that scholarly philosophical sense, before it broadened into the everyday meaning of any distinct thing or organisation. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the unstressed second syllable sounds like 'i', and writers must remember the -ity ending becomes -ities, not -itys, in the plural.

How the word is built

• ent- (from Latin esse: to be)
• -ity (state or quality)
• -es (plural suffix)