Mail

How to spell mail

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mail

What does mail mean?

1. nounLetters, parcels, and other items sent and delivered through the postal system.
2. verbTo send a letter or package through the postal system.
3. nounFlexible body armour made of interlinked metal rings, as in chain mail.

Mail in a sentence

• noun

  The morning mail arrived just before nine.

• verb

  Please mail the signed contract back to our office.

• noun

  The knight's coat of mail weighed nearly fifteen kilograms.

• noun

  A stack of unopened mail sat on the kitchen table.

• verb

  He had to mail the parcel before the post office closed.

• noun

  The museum displayed a shirt of chain mail from the eleventh century.

Where does mail come from?

Language of origin: French

The everyday sense of mail comes from the Old French word male, meaning a travelling bag or pouch, which itself came from a Germanic source related to a small leather sack. When English borrowed it around the 1200s, mail first referred to the bag a traveller carried, then to the pouch in which letters were transported, and finally, by the 1600s, to the letters and parcels themselves. The verb sense, to send by post, grew naturally out of that. A completely separate mail, meaning the linked metal rings of body armour as in 'chain mail', comes from a different French word, maille, meaning a mesh or net loop, ultimately from Latin macula 'a spot or mesh of a net'. Because mail sounds exactly like male, the spelling trap is purely auditory: there is no letter to warn you which one is meant, so context is everything.

How the word is built

• mail (from Old French male: a bag or pouch)

Words that sound like mail

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• male: Of or relating to the sex that produces sperm or pollen, rather than eggs.