Prophecies

How to spell prophecies

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce prophecies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does prophecies mean?

1. nounPredictions or foretellings of future events, especially those claimed to come from a divine or supernatural source.

Prophecies in a sentence

• The ancient text contained dozens of prophecies about kings and famines.

• Historians noted that several of the old prophecies never came true.

Where does prophecies come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the ancient Greek prophēteia, meaning a 'gift of interpreting the will of the gods', built from prophētēs, 'one who speaks for a god', which combined pro 'forth, before' with phēmi 'to speak'. A prophet was therefore literally a forth-speaker, someone who spoke out on behalf of a divine source rather than merely predicting the future. The Greek noun passed into Latin as prophetia and then into Old French as prophecie, before settling into English during the 1200s. The plural 'prophecies' follows the standard English rule of changing a final 'y' after a consonant to 'ies'. A useful spelling anchor: the noun keeps the soft 'c' (prophecy, prophecies), while the verb takes an 's' (prophesy, prophesies); the noun's 'c' echoes its Greek-Latin route through phētia and prophetia.

How the word is built

• pro- (forth, before)
• phe- (from Greek phēmi, to speak)
• -cy (noun-forming suffix)
• -es (plural)