Horses

How to spell horses

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce horses

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does horses mean?

1. nounMore than one horse, the large four-legged mammal kept for riding, racing, or pulling loads.

Horses in a sentence

• The farmer kept three horses in the back paddock.

• Both horses stumbled on the muddy track during the race.

Where does horses come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The singular 'horse' comes from the Old English hors, the everyday Anglo-Saxon name for the large solid-hoofed animal that people rode and harnessed for work. It belongs to a wider Germanic family, with close cousins in Old Norse hross and Old High German hros, all pointing back to a shared ancestral root. Curiously, the standard Latin and Greek words for the animal (equus and hippos) gave English a separate set of learned terms like 'equine' and 'hippopotamus', so the plain native word and the scholarly ones travelled completely different paths. The plural 'horses' simply adds the regular -es ending that English attaches to words ending in a soft sibilant sound, just as in 'houses' and 'glasses'. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years, and the only mild trap is remembering it is -es rather than a bare -s.

How the word is built

• hors (from Old English hors, the animal)
• -es (plural suffix)