Proxies

How to spell proxies

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce proxies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does proxies mean?

1. nounPeople or things authorised to act, stand in, or vote on behalf of others.
2. nounIntermediary servers that relay requests between a user's device and the wider internet.

Proxies in a sentence

• Shareholders who could not attend appointed proxies to vote for them.

• The company routed all web traffic through secure proxies to mask employee addresses.

• Researchers used rainfall records as proxies for crop yields in earlier centuries.

• The network team configured several proxies to balance the load across regions.

Where does proxies come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'proxy', which began life as a heavily contracted form of the medieval English word 'procuracy', meaning the office or authority of acting on someone else's behalf. That word traces back to the Latin procurare, literally 'to take care of' or 'to manage', built from pro 'on behalf of' and curare 'to care for', the same curare that gives us 'cure' and 'curator'. By the early 1400s English speakers had worn 'procuracy' down to the snappy single syllable cluster we now spell 'proxy', first used for a person empowered to vote or act in another's place. The meaning later broadened to cover any stand-in or substitute, and in modern usage it stretches to computing servers and to measurable stand-ins for things that cannot be measured directly. The spelling trap lies entirely in the plural: like other words ending in a consonant plus -y, the y turns to i before adding -es, giving 'proxies' rather than 'proxys'.

How the word is built

• proxy (contraction of procuracy: agency, acting for another)
• -es (plural)