Hives

How to spell hives

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hives

What does hives mean?

1. nounPlural of hive: the structures in which colonies of bees are kept or live.
2. nounAn itchy skin condition marked by raised red welts, also known as urticaria.

Hives in a sentence

• The beekeeper inspected three wooden hives at the edge of the orchard.

• The antihistamine cleared up the hives within an hour.

• Frost can damage hives left unsheltered through the winter.

• Certain foods bring her out in hives across the arms and neck.

Where does hives come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English hyf, the name for the domed straw or wooden container kept for honeybees, and it traces back through the Germanic family to roots tied to the idea of a curved or hollow vessel. For many centuries it referred only to the bee structure itself, and from there it grew a figurative sense of any busy, crowded place full of activity, as in a hive of industry. The skin-complaint meaning, the itchy raised welts also called urticaria, appeared much later and is recorded from around the eighteenth century; its origin in this sense is genuinely obscure, and lexicographers do not agree on how the bee word came to name a rash. The spelling stays helpfully regular: the silent final e of hive simply gives way to an s in the plural, with no doubling or vowel change to trip the writer.

How the word is built

• hive (from Old English hyf: a beehive)
• -s (plural)