Lenses

How to spell lenses

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lenses

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lenses mean?

1. nounPieces of curved transparent material that focus or spread light, as in glasses, cameras, or microscopes.

Lenses in a sentence

• The optician cleaned the smudges off both lenses before fitting the frames.

• Professional photographers often carry several lenses for different shots.

Where does lenses come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes straight back to the Latin lens, which literally meant 'lentil', the small flat-rounded pulse familiar from cooking. Early scientists noticed that a piece of glass ground convex on both sides had exactly the shape of a lentil seed, so in the late 1600s they borrowed lens as the name for such a curved piece of optical glass. The plural simply adds -es because the singular ends in -s, giving 'lenses'. The same lentil root survives in the botanical name Lens for the lentil plant and in the word 'lentil' itself by way of Old French. Remembering that the singular is just 'lens' helps with the spelling: you keep the single n and the single s, then add -es to make more than one.

How the word is built

• lens (Latin lens: lentil, applied to the curved glass)
• -es (plural suffix)