Months

How to spell months

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce months

What does months mean?

1. nounMore than one of the twelve named periods into which a year is divided.

Months in a sentence

• The building project ran several months over schedule.

• She saved steadily for six months before booking the holiday.

Where does months come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'month', which descends from the Old English monath, the word for a division of the year. That noun was built directly on mona, the Old English word for the moon, because early calendars measured time by the cycle of the moon from one new moon to the next. The connection runs right back through the Germanic languages and into a much older root shared with the Latin mensis and the Greek men, both meaning 'month', which in turn link to words for measuring. So at its heart a month is literally a 'moon period', and the silent reminder of that lineage is why month and moon still share their opening letters. The plural simply adds -s, but the resulting cluster of -nths is awkward to say and to write, which is the real spelling trap.

How the word is built

• month (from Old English monath, a lunar period)
• -s (plural)