Geese

How to spell geese

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce geese

What does geese mean?

1. nounMore than one goose; the large web-footed waterbirds with long necks.

Geese in a sentence

• A flock of geese landed on the village pond at dawn.

• The farmer kept three geese to guard the yard.

Where does geese come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Geese is the inherited plural of 'goose', a thoroughly native English word that traces back to the Old English gōs, whose plural was gēs. The vowel difference between goose and geese is not random: it comes from a Germanic process called i-mutation, in which an old plural ending containing an 'i' sound pulled the root vowel forward in the mouth before that ending wore away, leaving only the altered vowel behind. The same prehistoric mechanism explains why we say foot and feet, tooth and teeth, and man and men. Cousins of the word survive across the Germanic family, such as German Gans and Dutch gans, all going back to a common ancestor meaning the familiar farmyard and wild waterbird. Because the modern spelling shows that vowel shift as 'ee', the trap for writers is simply remembering that this plural is spelled with a double e and never takes a regular -s.

How the word is built

• Irregular plural of 'goose': formed by an ancient vowel change (i-mutation) rather than adding -s, so the singular 'oo' becomes the plural 'ee'.