Plane

How to spell plane

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce plane

What does plane mean?

1. nounA powered flying vehicle with wings; an aeroplane or airplane.
2. nounA perfectly flat, two-dimensional surface, especially in geometry.
3. nounA hand tool with a blade for shaving wood smooth and level.
4. verbTo shave wood flat with a tool, or for a boat to skim along the water surface.

Plane in a sentence

• noun

  The plane landed twenty minutes ahead of schedule.

• noun

  The two lines intersect within the same horizontal plane.

• noun

  The carpenter ran a plane along the edge of the door.

• verb

  You can plane the rough board until the surface is even.

• noun

  We boarded the plane at gate fourteen and stowed our bags.

• noun

  In geometry, any three points define a single plane.

Where does plane come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The spelling 'plane' traces back to the Latin planum, meaning 'a flat or level surface', which was itself the neuter form of the adjective planus, 'flat, even'. English borrowed it through French during the 1600s for the geometric idea of a perfectly flat surface, and the carpenter's smoothing tool took its name from the same notion of making wood flat and level. The 'plain' you write a field with comes from the very same Latin planus, which is exactly why the two spellings are so easily muddled. The aircraft meaning is younger and arrived by a different route: it is a clipped form of 'aeroplane', coined in the 1800s from Greek aero- ('air') joined to a word related to planos, 'wandering' or 'soaring', and it settled on the spelling 'plane' to match. So a modern 'plane' can mean a flat surface, a tool, or a flying machine, all sharing the underlying idea of something level or gliding.

How the word is built

• plane (from Latin planum: flat surface); the aircraft sense is a shortening of 'aeroplane', from Greek aero- (air)
• planos (wandering)

Words that sound like plane

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

• plain: Simple and without decoration, or easy to understand and obvious.