Fortress

How to spell fortress

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fortress

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fortress mean?

1. nounA large, heavily fortified building or place built for military defence.

Fortress in a sentence

• The medieval fortress guarded the entrance to the valley for centuries.

• Tourists climbed the steep path to the old stone fortress on the hill.

Where does fortress come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived in English in the early 1300s from the Old French forteresse, which named a strong, fortified place. That French noun was built on the adjective fort, meaning 'strong', which descended directly from the Latin fortis, also meaning 'strong' or 'powerful'. The same fortis root sits inside a whole family of English words about strength, including 'fort', 'fortify', 'force', and even 'comfort', which once meant to strengthen someone. Over time the long French ending was trimmed in English to the single -ress you see today, and that compressed ending, sounding like an unstressed 'riss', is the spelling trap: writers must remember the double s and resist adding a stray e. By the late medieval period a fortress meant specifically a large, permanently defended stronghold rather than any temporary defence.

How the word is built

• fort (from Latin fortis: strong)
• -ress (noun suffix denoting a place, from Old French -eresse)