Injuries

How to spell injuries

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce injuries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does injuries mean?

1. nounInstances of physical harm or damage done to the body, as wounds or hurts.

Injuries in a sentence

• The paramedics treated several injuries at the crash site.

• Most of his injuries healed within a few weeks of the fall.

Where does injuries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'injury', which descends from the Latin iniuria, meaning a wrong, an injustice, or an insult. That noun was built from in-, meaning 'not' or 'against', combined with ius (genitive iuris), the Latin word for 'right' or 'law'; so an iniuria was literally something done against one's rights. English took the word in the late 1300s by way of Old French injurie, and at first it carried the broad sense of a wrongful or unjust act rather than physical harm. Over time the everyday meaning narrowed toward damage done to the body, while the older legal flavour survives in phrases like 'injurious'. The 'jur' you see in the middle is the same root that gives us 'jury', 'justice', and 'jurisdiction', which is a handy reminder that the spelling keeps the 'j' and the 'ur'. When the singular 'injury' becomes plural, the final '-y' changes to '-ies', the regular pattern for a noun ending in a consonant plus 'y'.

How the word is built

• in- (not, against)
• jur (right, law, from Latin ius/iuris)
• -y (noun)
• -ies (plural ending replacing -y)