Reflexes

How to spell reflexes

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce reflexes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does reflexes mean?

1. nounAutomatic, involuntary reactions of the body or quick instinctive responses to a situation.

Reflexes in a sentence

• The driver avoided the cyclist thanks to her sharp reflexes.

• The doctor tapped his knee to test his reflexes.

Where does reflexes come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin verb reflectere, which combined re- meaning 'back' with flectere meaning 'to bend', so the literal idea was 'to bend back'. The past participle reflexus gave the noun reflex, originally describing light or heat thrown back from a surface. By the nineteenth century physiologists had borrowed it for an involuntary action of the nervous system, a response that is 'bent back' automatically without conscious thought. The same flectere root sits inside familiar relatives such as 'flexible', 'deflect', and 'reflection', all sharing that core sense of bending or turning. The plural simply adds -es because the singular ends in the hissing -x sound, and that x is the spelling point worth fixing in memory: it is reflexes, not 'reflexs'.

How the word is built

• re- (back)
• flex (from flectere: to bend)
• -es (plural suffix)