Falls

How to spell falls

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce falls

What does falls mean?

1. verbMoves downward freely or quickly under gravity; drops or descends.
2. nounA place where a river or stream drops steeply, forming a cascade of water.

Falls in a sentence

• verb

  The temperature falls sharply once the sun goes down.

• noun

  The hiking trail ends at a viewing platform above the falls.

• verb

  Every autumn a thick layer of leaves falls across the lawn.

• noun

  Tourists gather each summer to photograph the thundering falls.

Where does falls come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is an inflected form of 'fall', which descends directly from the Old English verb feallan, meaning 'to drop down', 'to fail', or 'to die'. It belongs to the native Germanic core of English and has close cousins across the family, including the Dutch vallen and the German fallen, all tracing back to a shared Proto-Germanic root meaning 'to fall'. The noun sense, especially the plural used for a stretch of tumbling water, grew naturally out of the verb during the medieval and early modern periods, since a cascade is literally water that falls. The spelling has stayed pleasingly transparent: the double 'l' was already there in the Old English and Middle English forms, so the only thing the -s ending does is mark the third-person verb or the plural noun. Because the word is so old and so common, its spelling almost never trips adults up.

How the word is built

• fall (Old English feallan: to drop, descend)
• -s (third-person singular present, or plural noun ending)