Parties

How to spell parties

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce parties

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does parties mean?

1. nounFestive social gatherings where people meet to celebrate or enjoy themselves.
2. nounOrganised groups of people who share political aims and contest elections.
3. nounThe individuals or organisations involved on each side of a contract, dispute, or legal matter.

Parties in a sentence

• The hotel hosts birthday parties in its garden room every weekend.

• The smaller parties formed a coalition after the election results came in.

• Both parties signed the lease before the keys were handed over.

• Office parties at the end of the year often run late into the evening.

• Voters complained that the main parties offered almost identical policies.

• The mediator asked the two parties to set out their demands in writing.

Where does parties come from?

Language of origin: French

This is the plural of 'party', which came into English in the 1200s from the Old French 'partie', meaning 'a part, a portion, or a side'. That French noun grew out of the Latin 'pars' (genitive 'partis'), which literally meant 'a part or share', and the same root sits inside familiar relatives like 'partner', 'portion', and 'particle'. The earliest English sense was the legal and military one: a 'party' was one side in a dispute, contract, or conflict, a usage still alive in 'the parties to an agreement'. From there the word branched outwards to mean a body of people sharing a cause (a political party) and, by the early 1700s, a social gathering of guests. The spelling trap in the plural is the ordinary English rule that a final 'y' after a consonant turns into 'ie' before the '-s', giving 'parties' rather than the tempting but wrong 'partys'.

How the word is built

• part (from Latin pars: a part, share, side)
• -y (noun suffix)
• -ies (plural of words ending in consonant
• y)