Evenings

How to spell evenings

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce evenings

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does evenings mean?

1. nounThe periods of time at the end of the day, between late afternoon and night, considered more than one.

Evenings in a sentence

• The gym stays open late on weekday evenings.

• She spends her evenings studying for the accountancy exam.

Where does evenings come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word traces back to the Old English noun æfnung, which described the falling of dusk and was itself built on æfen, the older word simply meaning 'evening' or 'the close of day'. That æfen survives today in the poetic and archaic 'even' and 'eventide', so an 'evening' was originally the process of the daylight 'evening out' or growing dim. By the late medieval period 'evening' had settled into the fixed noun we know, and the regular plural was formed by adding -s. The spelling keeps the silent first 'e' and the unstressed middle that many speakers swallow, which is why the trickiest part is remembering the central 'en' before the '-ings'. It belongs to the same native Germanic family as the German 'Abend', meaning 'evening', showing how deep the word's roots run in the everyday vocabulary of the language.

How the word is built

• even (from Old English æfen, the close of day)
• -ing (noun-forming suffix)
• -s (plural)