Premises

How to spell premises

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce premises

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does premises mean?

1. nounA building or part of a building together with its land, especially as used by a business or organisation.
2. nounThe statements assumed to be true in an argument, from which a conclusion is drawn.

Premises in a sentence

• The company moved to larger premises near the motorway.

• The conclusion is only valid if both premises are true.

• Smoking is not permitted anywhere on the premises.

• The debate coach asked the students to examine the premises behind each claim.

Where does premises come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin praemittere, meaning 'to send before' or 'to set out in advance', built from prae 'before' and mittere 'to send', the same verb that gives us 'mission', 'missile' and 'transmit'. The neuter plural form praemissa was used by medieval logicians to mean 'things set down beforehand', that is, the propositions stated first in an argument from which a conclusion follows. English borrowed this in the 1300s as 'premise', a statement assumed at the start of a piece of reasoning. The property sense is a curious offshoot: in old legal documents the matters 'aforementioned' (the praemissa, the things mentioned earlier) referred to the buildings and land just described, and over time 'the premises' came to mean the property itself. That is why a single building is almost always called 'the premises' in the plural, and why the -ses ending, sounding like a plain plural, is the spelling that trips writers.

How the word is built

• prae- (before)
• miss (sent, from mittere: to send)
• -es (plural)