Presses

How to spell presses

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce presses

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does presses mean?

1. verbPushes firmly against something, or applies steady force or urging.
2. nounMore than one machine for printing or compressing, or instances of media coverage.

Presses in a sentence

• verb

  She presses the button to summon the lift.

• noun

  The old printing presses filled the basement of the newspaper office.

• verb

  The tailor presses each seam flat with a hot iron.

• noun

  The factory runs several hydraulic presses to shape the metal panels.

Where does presses come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb premere, meaning 'to press' or 'to push hard against', whose past participle stem pressus gave rise to the frequentative form pressare, 'to press repeatedly'. The verb travelled into Old French as presser, and English borrowed it in the 1300s as 'press', covering both the physical act of pushing and, soon after, the squeezing machine itself. The noun sense for the printing machine arrived in the 1500s, and from there the word came to mean printed publications collectively and then the news media as a whole. The double 's' in the root, kept all the way from Latin pressus, is the small spelling point to watch, since adding the '-es' ending leaves a cluster of letters that is easy to fumble. Close relatives sharing the same root include 'pressure', 'express', and 'compress'.

How the word is built

• press (from Latin premere/pressare: to press)
• -es (plural noun / third-person singular verb ending)