Mails

How to spell mails

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mails

What does mails mean?

1. verbSends a letter, parcel, or document through the postal system (third-person singular present).
2. nounBatches or separate lots of letters and parcels handled by the postal service.

Mails in a sentence

• verb

  The accounts clerk mails the invoices to clients every Friday.

• noun

  The incoming mails are sorted by region before delivery.

• verb

  She mails the signed contract back to head office without delay.

• noun

  All outgoing mails must reach the depot before the five o'clock collection.

Where does mails come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the plural and verb form of 'mail', which entered English in the 1200s from Old French 'male', meaning a bag, pouch, or travelling case, a word the French had taken in turn from a Germanic source related to the modern Dutch 'maal'. For centuries the English word simply meant a leather bag or wallet, and only later did it come to mean the bag in which a courier carried letters. By the 1600s the sense had shifted from the bag itself to its contents, the letters and parcels travelling within it, which gave us the modern postal meaning and, eventually, the verb 'to mail' meaning to send through the post. The 's' here is the ordinary inflection, marking either more than one batch of post or the third-person present of the verb. Note that 'mails' sounds identical to 'males', the plural of 'male', so the two are easily confused in writing even though they share no history.

How the word is built

• mail (postal matter; from Old French male, a travelling bag)
• -s (plural noun / third-person singular verb ending)