Folks

How to spell folks

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce folks

What does folks mean?

1. nounPeople in general, especially considered as a group.
2. nounOne's parents or close family, used informally.

Folks in a sentence

• Most folks pay their bills online these days.

• She is driving home to visit her folks for the weekend.

• The campsite welcomes folks of all ages.

• My folks still live in the same house where I grew up.

Where does folks come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English noun folc, which meant a people, a nation, or the common populace, and it belongs to the native Germanic core of English rather than the borrowed Latin and French layers. The same root shows up across the Germanic languages, including German Volk and Dutch volk, all carrying the sense of an ordinary body of people. Through the medieval period folc became folk and was used both for a people as a whole and for ordinary individuals, and the casual plural folks grew up to mean people in general or, more warmly, one's own family. A familiar relative is the modern compound 'folklore', the traditional beliefs of a people. The spelling keeps the silent l from the old form, which is the small trap here: the word is said as if it were 'foaks', yet the l stays written.

How the word is built

• folk (from Old English folc: people, nation)
• -s (plural)