Misses

How to spell misses

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce misses

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does misses mean?

1. verbThird-person singular form of 'miss': fails to hit, catch, attend, or notice, or feels the absence of someone or something.
2. nounPlural of 'miss', meaning attempts or shots that fail to hit their target, or more than one unmarried woman.

Misses in a sentence

• verb

  If she leaves home late, she usually misses the early train.

• noun

  The striker had three clear misses before finally scoring.

• verb

  He misses his family badly whenever the job sends him abroad.

• noun

  The dartboard scoresheet recorded far more misses than hits.

Where does misses come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The verb at the heart of this word comes from the Old English missan, meaning 'to fail to hit, to go wide of a target', a thoroughly native Germanic word with relatives in Old Norse missa and Dutch missen. From the literal sense of an arrow or blow that fails to land, English extended it to failing to catch a train, failing to notice something, and feeling the absence of a person, all by the medieval period. The form 'misses' is simply that verb carrying the regular third-person singular ending -es, added because the stem already ends in the hissing -ss sound. The noun 'miss', meaning an unmarried woman or used as a title, is unrelated in spelling history: it is a shortening of 'mistress' that appeared in the 1600s, and its plural is likewise 'misses'. The doubled s of the root plus the -es ending is the small spelling trap, since the word can sound very close to the informal 'missus'.

How the word is built

• miss (root: to fail to hit, or an unmarried woman)
• -es (third-person verb / plural noun ending)