Goods

How to spell goods

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce goods

What does goods mean?

1. nounArticles of trade or merchandise; movable possessions or products that are bought and sold.
2. nounCargo or freight carried by rail or road, as opposed to passengers.

Goods in a sentence

• The warehouse stores electrical goods ready for shipping.

• A heavy goods train rumbled slowly through the junction.

• Customers may return faulty goods within thirty days for a refund.

• The company moves its goods by rail to cut delivery costs.

Where does goods come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The noun goods grows directly out of the adjective good, which comes from the Old English god, meaning 'fitting', 'suitable', or 'of high quality'. Over time the plural of good came to mean 'valuable things' or 'property', because anything good was something worth owning. By the medieval period the form goods had settled into a fixed collective sense covering possessions and items of trade, which is why it is treated as plural even though it names a category. The same Germanic root lies behind the Dutch goed and German Gut, both still meaning 'property' or 'estate'. The spelling trap is gentle: it keeps the double o of good and simply adds an s, so the only real risk is the lone-letter slip of writing 'gods'.

How the word is built

• good (from Old English god: fitting, suitable, valuable)
• -s (plural marker, here forming a collective noun)