Grades

How to spell grades

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce grades

What does grades mean?

1. nounMarks awarded for academic work, or ranked levels of quality or rank.
2. verbAssesses work and assigns a mark, or sorts items into ranked levels.

Grades in a sentence

• noun

  Her grades improved once she started revising earlier in the term.

• verb

  The examiner grades each script against a strict marking scheme.

• noun

  The timber yard sorts its planks into three grades of quality.

• verb

  A machine grades the eggs by weight before they are packed.

Where does grades come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin gradus, which literally meant a step or a pace, and by extension a stage in a sequence or a degree of rank. That noun grew from the verb gradi, meaning to walk or to step forward, the same root that gives us gradual, gradient, and progress, where the idea of moving one step at a time is still clearly visible. English took grade from French grade in the sixteenth century, originally to describe a degree or stage in a scale. The senses of a mark of quality and a school class developed later, especially in American education, but each still carries the old notion of a measured step on a ladder. Adding -s simply forms the plural noun or the third-person verb, and because the root vowel is long the silent e is kept before the ending.

How the word is built

• grad- (from Latin gradus: step, degree)
• -e
• -s (plural / third-person verb suffix)