Legs

How to spell legs

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce legs

What does legs mean?

1. nounThe limbs on which a person or animal stands and moves, or similar supporting parts of an object.

Legs in a sentence

• After the long hike her legs ached for two days.

• The wobbly table needed one of its legs replaced.

Where does legs come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Legs is simply the plural of leg, a word English borrowed from Old Norse around the 1200s. The Old Norse noun leggr referred to a leg or a bone of the lower limb, and that Scandinavian root gradually replaced the older native term shank for the limb between hip and foot. The same Norse stem also gave related senses to do with hollow bones and stems, which is why we still speak of the legs of a table or the legs of a journey. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable: a short word with no silent letters and a plain plural ending, which is why it gives fluent adults almost no trouble. Its survival is a neat reminder of how deeply Old Norse vocabulary embedded itself in everyday English.

How the word is built

• leg (limb, from Old Norse leggr)
• -s (plural)