Mice

How to spell mice

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mice

What does mice mean?

1. nounThe plural of mouse: small rodents with pointed snouts and long tails.
2. nounThe plural of mouse used for the hand-held pointing devices that control a computer cursor.

Mice in a sentence

• The field mice had nested in the old stone wall.

• The office ordered a dozen wireless mice for the new workstations.

• Traps were set in the cellar after several mice were spotted.

• Both mice stopped responding when the batteries ran flat.

Where does mice come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Mice is the irregular plural of mouse, and it comes straight from Old English, the Germanic language spoken in early England. The singular was mūs and its plural was mȳs, formed not by adding an ending but by changing the vowel inside the word, a process called i-mutation that also gave us pairs like foot and feet or goose and geese. The same ancient root runs right across the Germanic and even wider Indo-European family: German has Maus with the plural Mäuse, and the Latin mus and Greek mys are distant cousins. Because the plural was built by an internal vowel change rather than a tacked-on -s, English never developed a regular form like 'mouses', which is exactly why the spelling switches to 'mice'. In the computing age the word stretched to cover the hand-held pointing device, and many writers cheerfully use 'mice' for those too, keeping the thousand-year-old plural alive.

How the word is built

• mouse (singular)
• irregular i-mutation plural (mūs to mȳs); no -s suffix