Police

How to spell police

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce police

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does police mean?

1. nounThe official body of people employed to maintain public order and enforce the law.
2. verbTo keep order in an area or to monitor and control an activity.

Police in a sentence

• noun

  The police arrived within minutes of the alarm sounding.

• verb

  Volunteers were asked to police the festival entrance for the weekend.

• noun

  She reported the stolen car to the local police that evening.

• verb

  The moderators police the forum to remove abusive posts.

Where does police come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word travelled from the Greek polis, meaning 'city', which gave rise to politeia, a broad term for citizenship, the running of a state, and civic order. Latin reshaped this into politia, meaning 'the state' or 'civil administration', and French inherited it as police, where it long meant public order and the regulation of a community rather than a uniformed force. English borrowed the French word in the 1500s, at first carrying that wider sense of orderly government and public administration. Only in the 1700s did police narrow to mean the organised body of officers who enforce the law, a sense that first took firm hold in France and then in Britain. The same polis root still sits inside 'politics', 'policy', and 'metropolis', and that shared ancestry explains why the spelling keeps the soft -ce ending rather than anything resembling its 'leese' sound.

How the word is built

• polic- (from Greek polis: city, civic administration)
• -e