Melodies

How to spell melodies

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce melodies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does melodies mean?

1. nounMore than one melody; pleasing sequences of musical notes that form recognisable tunes.

Melodies in a sentence

• The composer wrote several gentle melodies for the film score.

• Folk songs often carry simple melodies that are easy to remember.

Where does melodies come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word descends from the Greek melodia, which meant a singing or a tune and was built from melos, meaning 'song' or 'tune', combined with aoide or oide, meaning 'song' or 'singing'; the same oide element sits inside 'ode' and 'rhapsody'. Latin took the term as melodia, and Old French softened it to melodie, which is the form that crossed into English in the 1300s. For centuries it described a sweet sequence of sounds, and over time it settled into its modern musical sense of a tune carried by a single line of notes. The plural simply follows the regular English rule of changing a final -y to -ies, which is the main spelling point to watch. It is worth remembering that the opening syllable is 'mel', not 'mela', because the unstressed middle vowel is easy to misjudge when writing the word from memory.

How the word is built

• melo- (from Greek melos: song, tune)
• -ody (from Greek oide: song)
• -ies (plural of -y)