Ladies

How to spell ladies

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ladies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ladies mean?

1. nounMore than one lady; women, often used as a polite or collective term.

Ladies in a sentence

• The ladies in the book club meet every Thursday evening.

• Several ladies from the office organised the retirement party.

Where does ladies come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'lady', which comes from the Old English compound hlæfdige. That word literally meant 'loaf-kneader', joining hlaf (bread or loaf, the ancestor of our modern 'loaf') with the root dige related to kneading dough. The mistress of a household was the one who oversaw the bread, while her husband was the hlafweard or 'loaf-guardian', which later smoothed down into 'lord'. Over the centuries hlæfdige lost its harder consonants and became 'lavedi', then 'lady', and its meaning rose from household manager to a woman of rank and finally to a polite term for any woman. The plural keeps the regular English pattern where a word ending in a consonant plus 'y' swaps the 'y' for 'ie' before adding 's', which is exactly the spelling point worth remembering.

How the word is built

• lady (from Old English hlæfdige: bread-kneader, mistress of a household)
• -es (plural, with y changing to ie)