Inches

How to spell inches

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce inches

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does inches mean?

1. nounUnits of length each equal to one twelfth of a foot, about 2.54 centimetres.
2. verbMoves very slowly and gradually, by small amounts at a time.

Inches in a sentence

• noun

  The shelf measured forty inches across.

• verb

  The traffic inches forward at a crawl during rush hour.

• noun

  Heavy rain dropped several inches of water overnight.

• verb

  She inches the heavy box across the floor without lifting it.

Where does inches come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin uncia, which meant 'a twelfth part' and was used both for a twelfth of a foot and a twelfth of a pound. Old English borrowed the term very early, before the Norman Conquest, as ynce, naming the small unit of length that is one twelfth of a foot. Remarkably, the very same Latin uncia gave English a second word, 'ounce', the unit of weight, so the inch and the ounce are linguistic twins separated only by how the Latin was filtered into English. Over the centuries the spelling settled into 'inch', with the soft 'ch' sound replacing the harder Latin 'c'. The plural and verb form simply add -es, and the word also developed a figurative verb sense of moving forward by tiny increments, as if advancing one inch at a time.

How the word is built

• inch (a unit of length, from Latin uncia: a twelfth part)
• -es (plural noun ending, or third-person singular verb ending)