Exes

How to spell exes

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce exes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exes mean?

1. nounFormer romantic partners or spouses, considered as a group.
2. nounMore than one instance of the letter X.

Exes in a sentence

• Both of her exes still send birthday cards every year.

• The treasure map was marked with two faded exes near the river.

• He stays on friendly terms with all of his exes.

• She signed the card with a row of exes to stand for kisses.

Where does exes come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is the plural of 'ex', a noun that grew out of the Latin prefix ex-, meaning 'out of' or 'formerly'. In English the prefix had long been attached to titles and roles to mean 'no longer holding that position', as in 'ex-president' or 'ex-husband', where ex- literally signals someone who has stepped out of the role. During the twentieth century speakers clipped these compounds and let the prefix stand alone as a casual noun, so an 'ex' became a former spouse or romantic partner in its own right. Once 'ex' worked as an ordinary countable noun, it took the regular English plural, and because the word ends in an s-like sound it gains '-es' rather than a bare '-s', giving 'exes'. The spelling trap is purely that final cluster: writers reaching for a possessive habit sometimes insert an apostrophe and write 'ex's', but the simple plural carries no apostrophe at all.

How the word is built

• ex (former; from Latin ex 'out of, formerly')
• -es (plural suffix)