Leaves

How to spell leaves

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce leaves

What does leaves mean?

1. nounThe flat, typically green growths that extend from the stems of plants and trees; the plural of leaf.
2. verbGoes away from a place or person; the third-person singular form of the verb leave.

Leaves in a sentence

• noun

  The autumn leaves covered the entire driveway.

• verb

  Her train leaves the station at exactly nine each morning.

• noun

  She raked the fallen leaves into a large pile.

• verb

  He always leaves the office before the traffic builds up.

Where does leaves come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural and verb form built on two distinct but similarly spelled English words. The noun 'leaf' descends from the Old English 'lēaf', meaning the flat green growth of a plant, a word shared across the Germanic family with the Dutch 'loof' and German 'Laub'. When a word ending in the soft 'f' sound is made plural in English, that 'f' historically softened to a 'v' sound, which is why 'leaf' becomes 'leaves' rather than 'leafs', the same pattern seen in 'knife' to 'knives' and 'wolf' to 'wolves'. The verb 'leave', meaning to go away or to let remain, comes from the separate Old English 'lǣfan', meaning 'to let remain behind', and it picks up the same '-ves' spelling in its third-person form. Because both the plant noun and the departure verb land on the identical spelling and sound, the word does double duty in modern English. The 'ea' spelling preserves an older vowel that has long since shifted in pronunciation, which is the small trap for writers.

How the word is built

• leaf (Old English lēaf)
• -es (plural/3rd-person ending, with f changing to v)