Pipes

How to spell pipes

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pipes

What does pipes mean?

1. nounTubes or hollow cylinders used to carry water, gas, oil, or other substances.
2. verbConveys a substance through a tube, or transmits sound or data along a channel.

Pipes in a sentence

• noun

  The frozen pipes burst overnight and flooded the basement.

• verb

  The system pipes fresh water from the reservoir to every household.

• noun

  The plumber traced the leak to the copper pipes behind the wall.

• verb

  The station pipes music into the waiting room all day.

Where does pipes come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word goes back to the Old English pipe, a hollow tube, which English took from the Late Latin pipa. That Latin word came from the verb pipare, meaning 'to chirp' or 'to peep', an imitation of the thin, high sound a bird makes. The earliest English pipes were musical: simple wind instruments whose sound recalled that birdlike chirp, so the name described the noise long before it described any plumbing. Over the centuries the sense of a hollow tube broadened to cover any narrow conduit, which is how it came to mean the tubes that carry water, gas, and oil. The same imitative root sits behind 'pipe up' and the verb 'to pipe', and it explains why a single short word now covers both organ pipes and the pipes under a kitchen sink.

How the word is built

• pipe (tube/hollow cylinder)
• -s (plural or third-person singular suffix)