Hits

How to spell hits

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hits

What does hits mean?

1. nounThings, especially songs, films, or products, that are very popular and successful.
2. verbStrikes something or someone with force, as the third-person singular of the verb hit.
3. nounRecorded visits to or requests made of a website or web page.

Hits in a sentence

• noun

  The band released an album of their greatest hits.

• verb

  She always hits the ball cleanly off the tee.

• noun

  The site logged thousands of hits after the launch.

• noun

  The new comedy was one of the biggest hits of the year.

• verb

  The hammer hits the nail squarely on the head.

• noun

  A good headline boosts the number of hits a page receives.

Where does hits come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The base word hit comes from late Old English hyttan, which was borrowed from the Old Norse verb hitta meaning 'to come upon' or 'to meet with by chance'. In its earliest English use it carried that sense of encountering or reaching something rather than striking it, and a trace of this survives when we say a guess 'hits the mark'. Over the medieval period the meaning narrowed and hardened into the modern idea of striking a target or landing a blow. The figurative noun sense of a popular success, as in a hit record or a box-office hit, grew up much later, recorded from the seventeenth century onward, from the idea of striking the public's taste. The plural and third-person form hits simply adds the regular Germanic -s ending, so the spelling has stayed short and phonetic throughout its history.

How the word is built

• hit (the root verb, to strike)
• -s (plural noun marker, or third-person singular verb marker)