Piles

How to spell piles

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce piles

What does piles mean?

1. nounHeaps or stacks of things laid one on top of another.
2. nounLong posts or columns driven deep into the ground to support a structure.
3. verbLays or stacks things in a heap; accumulates (third-person singular).

Piles in a sentence

• noun

  The desk was buried under piles of unopened mail.

• noun

  The engineers drove steel piles into the riverbed before building the bridge.

• verb

  Every evening she piles the dishes beside the sink.

• noun

  She sorted the laundry into neat piles on the bed.

• noun

  The old pier rested on timber piles that had rotted over the years.

• verb

  Work always piles up after a long weekend away.

Where does piles come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word gathers together several strands that all settled on the same spelling. The 'heap' sense traces to the Latin pila, meaning 'pillar' or 'stone breakwater', which passed through Old French as pile and entered English in the 1400s, gradually shifting from a built-up column to any orderly stack of things. The 'driven post' sense came earlier from the Old English pil, itself borrowed from the Latin pilum, the heavy javelin carried by Roman soldiers, so a foundation pile is literally a great spike sunk into the ground. The medical sense, the swellings better known clinically as haemorrhoids, comes from another Latin pila meaning 'ball', because the swellings were thought to resemble little balls. All three converged on the short, regular spelling p-i-l-e, and the plural simply adds -s, so the word holds few traps for the modern writer.

How the word is built

• pile (heap, stake, or swelling)
• -s (plural / third-person singular marker)