Lights

How to spell lights

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lights

What does lights mean?

1. nounDevices or fittings that give off light, or the beams of brightness they produce.
2. verbSets something alight or causes a space to become bright.

Lights in a sentence

• noun

  The office lights stayed on all night by mistake.

• verb

  He always lights the barbecue before the guests arrive.

• noun

  Fog made the oncoming lights hard to see on the motorway.

• verb

  A single candle barely lights the whole room.

Where does lights come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word traces back to the Old English leoht, which meant both 'brightness' and the source of it, and which sat alongside related forms across the Germanic languages, such as the Old High German lioht and the modern German Licht. The deeper ancestor is a Proto-Germanic root meaning 'to shine', tied ultimately to an Indo-European base for brightness that also gives Latin lux 'light' and lumen 'lamp'. Over the centuries the spelling carried a Germanic 'gh' cluster that once represented a throaty consonant sound, long since gone silent in modern speech; that surviving but unpronounced 'gh' is the chief spelling trap. The same word does double duty as a verb meaning 'to set alight' or 'to illuminate', a use present from the earliest English records. Adding the plain '-s' gives both the plural of the noun and the third-person form of the verb, so the bare written shape stays the same in either role.

How the word is built

• light (from Old English leoht: brightness)
• -s (plural / third-person singular)