Fairs

How to spell fairs

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fairs

What does fairs mean?

1. nounPublic gatherings for trade, entertainment, or exhibition, such as funfairs, agricultural shows, or trade events.

Fairs in a sentence

• The county agricultural fairs are held every summer.

• Local craft and produce fairs attract crowds of weekend shoppers.

Where does fairs come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This noun traces back to the Latin feria, meaning a holiday or feast day, and its plural feriae, the days set aside for religious festivals on which no work was done. Because such festival days drew crowds, they naturally became occasions for trading, and the word came to describe the gathering and the market itself. It reached English in the early 1300s through the Old French feire, and the medieval English fair was a great periodic market chartered by the crown, often timed to a saint's feast. Over time the sense broadened to cover agricultural shows, funfairs, and trade exhibitions, all kept together under the same word. It is worth noting that the unrelated adjective fair, meaning beautiful or just, comes instead from the Old English faeger and is purely Germanic, so two quite different histories happen to share the spelling; the plural fairs always belongs to the festival and market sense, and it is easily confused in writing with fares, the unrelated word for transport charges.

How the word is built

• fair (public gathering or market, from Latin feria)
• -s (plural)