Ex

How to spell ex

2 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ex

What does ex mean?

1. nounA person's former romantic partner or spouse.

Ex in a sentence

• She still shares custody of the dog with her ex.

• He ran into his ex at the supermarket and felt awkward all afternoon.

Where does ex come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word is a clipping of the Latin prefix ex-, which literally meant 'out of' or 'away from', and by extension came to mean 'former' or 'previously holding a position'. In English, ex- had long been attached to titles and relationships to mark something that no longer applied, as in 'ex-president' or 'ex-husband', where it signals a status that has ended. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, casual speakers began lopping off the rest of the phrase and using the bare 'ex' as a noun, most commonly to mean a former romantic partner or spouse. The same Latin root sits inside dozens of everyday words such as 'exit' (the way out) and 'export' (to carry out), so the sense of 'out and gone' has stayed remarkably consistent. Because it is so short and phonetically obvious, the spelling almost never troubles writers; the only quirk is that a two-letter word sounds like the single letter X.

How the word is built

• ex- (Latin prefix: out of, former), used here as a standalone noun