Mattresses

How to spell mattresses

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce mattresses

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mattresses mean?

1. nounMore than one large padded pad used as or on a bed for sleeping.

Mattresses in a sentence

• The hotel ordered new mattresses for all forty rooms.

• Both spare mattresses are stored upright in the garage.

Where does mattresses come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

The word traces back to the Arabic matrah, which literally meant 'a place where something is thrown down', and by extension a cushion or mat flung on the floor to lie on. During the Crusades, Europeans encountered the Arab custom of sleeping on padded cushions and borrowed the word; it passed into medieval Latin as materacium and then into Italian as materasso. English took it through Old French materas in the 1200s, originally describing a quilted pad laid on a bed frame. The doubled letters that trip writers today, the tt and the ss, are largely a later spelling convention rather than anything in the Arabic original, which is why 'mattresses' looks heavier than its single-consonant ancestor. The plural simply adds -es because the word ends in an s sound.

How the word is built

• mattress (from Arabic matrah: a place where something is thrown down)
• -es (plural suffix)