Fives

How to spell fives

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce fives

What does fives mean?

1. nounMore than one instance of the number five, or several things grouped or rated as five.

Fives in a sentence

• The cashier handed me three fives in change.

• The teacher asked the class to count in fives up to fifty.

Where does fives come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'five', which descends from the Old English fif, the native Anglo-Saxon word for the number. It belongs to a wider Germanic family: compare the Dutch vijf and the German funf, all tracing back to a shared ancestral root that also gave Latin its quinque and Greek its pente. The 'f' sound at both ends of the word reflects this old Germanic shape, and the spelling has stayed remarkably stable for centuries. When pluralised, 'five' simply takes an -s, and the singular 'f' shifts to a 'v' sound, a pattern English keeps softly in speech but not in the letters. The word is also used as the name of a hand-and-ball court game, a usage thought to come from the five fingers of the hand once used to strike the ball.

How the word is built

• five (the number, from Old English fif)
• -s (plural)