Flies

How to spell flies

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flies

What does flies mean?

1. verbMoves through the air, or travels by aircraft (third-person singular of 'fly').
2. nounMore than one fly; small winged insects.

Flies in a sentence

• verb

  The pilot flies the early morning route to Madrid twice a week.

• noun

  The open bins attracted clouds of flies all summer.

• verb

  A paper plane flies best when the wings are folded evenly.

• noun

  We hung a screen on the door to keep the flies out of the kitchen.

Where does flies come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural and present-tense form of 'fly', which traces back to two closely linked Old English words: the verb flēogan, meaning 'to move through the air', and the noun flēoge, meaning 'a flying insect'. Both grew from the same Germanic root that gave Dutch 'vlieg' and German 'Fliege', all carrying the basic idea of something that moves on wings. The insect was simply named for the most obvious thing it did, so the noun and the verb share an origin rather than being a coincidence. When 'fly' takes the -es ending, English spelling changes the final y to i, which is why the word is written 'flies' and not 'flys'. That y-to-ies switch is the only real spelling decision here, and it follows the same rule as 'tries', 'cries', and 'skies'.

How the word is built

• fly (Old English flēoge / flēogan)
• -es (plural noun / third-person singular verb ending; the y becomes i before -es)