Meets

How to spell meets

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce meets

What does meets mean?

1. verbComes together with someone or something, whether by arrangement, encounter, or physical joining.
2. nounOrganised sporting gatherings, such as athletics or swimming competitions.

Meets in a sentence

• verb

  She meets her financial adviser at the office every quarter.

• noun

  The swim team travels to three regional meets each season.

• verb

  The river meets the sea just beyond the old harbour wall.

• noun

  Track meets at the stadium draw large crowds every spring.

Where does meets come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is an inflected form of the verb and noun 'meet', which descends from the Old English verb mētan, meaning 'to find, to come upon, or to encounter'. That verb grew out of the noun gemōt, meaning 'an assembly or meeting', from a Proto-Germanic root shared with Dutch 'moeten' and related northern European forms. The original sense was very physical: to literally fall in with someone on a road or path, which is why we still 'meet' people face to face. Over the centuries the word broadened to cover arranged encounters, gatherings, and even the abstract idea of one thing joining another, as when two roads meet. The spelling trap is purely aural: 'meets' sounds identical to 'meats' (the food, from Old English mete), so the double 'e' must be remembered as the encounter word, not the dinner word.

How the word is built

• meet (Old English mētan: to encounter)
• -s (third-person singular present, or noun plural)