Heights

How to spell heights

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce heights

What does heights mean?

1. nounHigh places or elevated ground, especially areas of land that rise well above the surroundings.
2. nounThe highest or most extreme point of something, such as success, intensity, or absurdity.

Heights in a sentence

• The new estate was built on the wooded heights above the town.

• The company reached the heights of its success just before the merger.

• A fear of heights keeps her away from glass balconies and tall bridges.

• The dispute escalated to new heights of pettiness over the parking spaces.

Where does heights come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'height', which comes from the Old English noun 'hēahþu' or 'hīehþu', meaning 'highness' or 'the quality of being high'. That noun was built directly on 'hēah', the ancestor of our modern word 'high', with a suffix that turned the adjective into an abstract noun in much the way 'warmth' was formed from 'warm'. Over the centuries the ending drifted in both sound and spelling, and the older 'highth' form (still echoed in the way some people say the word) eventually gave way to 'height'. The stubborn 'gh', once pronounced as a throaty sound that English later lost, is the same silent cluster found in 'high', 'light', and 'night', and it is the chief reason the spelling feels so detached from the sound. The 'ei' order, against the familiar 'i before e' habit, makes the plural a recurring stumble for confident writers.

How the word is built

• heigh- (from Old English hēah: high)
• -t (noun-forming suffix marking an abstract or measured quality)
• -s (plural)