Firemen

How to spell firemen

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce firemen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does firemen mean?

1. nounMore than one person whose job is to extinguish fires and rescue people.

Firemen in a sentence

• Three firemen carried the heavy hose up the stairwell.

• The local firemen visited the school to demonstrate their equipment.

Where does firemen come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a straightforward English compound, joining 'fire' to the plural of 'man'. The first element descends from Old English 'fȳr', meaning flame or burning, a word shared with the Germanic family (compare modern German 'Feuer' and Dutch 'vuur'). The second element comes from Old English 'mann', which originally meant simply 'a person' of either sex before narrowing to its modern use. 'Fireman' was first recorded in the 1650s for someone who tended a furnace or fire, and only later did it come to mean a person who fights fires or one who stoked the boiler of a steam engine. The plural follows the same vowel-change pattern as 'man' to 'men', so the only spelling care needed is remembering the single solid word and the -men ending rather than -man.

How the word is built

• fire (Old English fȳr: flame)
• men (irregular plural of man, Old English mann: person)