Piece

How to spell piece

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce piece

What does piece mean?

1. nounA part or portion of something, or a single item from a set or category.

Piece in a sentence

• Would you like a piece of cake?

• He gave her a small piece of advice.

• I lost the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

• She wrote a piece for the school magazine.

• She cut me a generous piece of pie.

Where does piece come from?

Language of origin: French

The word entered English in the 1200s from the Old French piece, meaning a bit, a part, or a fragment of something larger. That French form is thought to descend from an unrecorded Late Latin pettia, which scholars trace further back to a Gaulish (Celtic) root petti, meaning a portion or piece. From the start it carried the idea of a separated part of a whole, and English steadily widened it to cover everything from a piece of bread to a piece of music or a written piece. Its long survival has kept the awkward French spelling, where the c is soft and the troublesome ie vowel follows the old rhyme 'i before e', which is exactly the trap that makes writers swap it for the homophone 'peace'. The unrelated word 'peace' arrived separately from Latin pax, so the shared sound is pure coincidence rather than common ancestry.

How the word is built

• piece (single root noun, from Old French piece: a part or portion; no separable affixes)

Words that sound like piece

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• peace: A state of calm, quiet, or freedom from conflict and war.