Lilies

How to spell lilies

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lilies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lilies mean?

1. nounMore than one lily; tall flowering plants with large, often trumpet-shaped blooms.

Lilies in a sentence

• The florist arranged white lilies in a tall glass vase.

• Lilies in the garden pond opened their blooms by midmorning.

Where does lilies come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'lily', which reaches back to the Latin lilium, the ordinary Roman name for the white flower we still picture today. The Latin word is thought to descend ultimately from an earlier Mediterranean source that also gave Greek its 'leirion', so the plant kept roughly the same name across several ancient cultures. Old English borrowed it very early as 'lilie', long before the Norman Conquest, which is why the word feels thoroughly native rather than freshly imported. When English forms the plural of a noun ending in a consonant followed by 'y', it swaps the 'y' for 'ies', so 'lily' becomes 'lilies'; the single 'l' in the middle is the spot writers often double by mistake. The flower has carried strong symbolic weight for centuries, standing for purity in religious art and appearing on royal heraldry as the stylised fleur-de-lis.

How the word is built

• lil- (from Latin lilium, lily)
• -ies (plural of nouns ending in consonant
• -y)