Returns

How to spell returns

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce returns

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does returns mean?

1. verbComes or goes back to a previous place, state, or owner.
2. nounThe profits or yields produced by an investment.
3. nounGoods that customers send back to a shop, or the process of handling them.

Returns in a sentence

• verb

  She always returns home before dark on winter evenings.

• noun

  The pension fund promised steady returns over twenty years.

• noun

  The shop processes online returns at a separate counter.

• verb

  The library fines you when nobody returns the books on time.

• noun

  Higher risk often comes with the chance of bigger returns.

• noun

  After the sales, the warehouse was buried in customer returns.

Where does returns come from?

Language of origin: French

This word goes back to the Old French verb retorner, built from re-, meaning 'back', and torner, meaning 'to turn'. The torner element traces to the Latin tornare, 'to turn on a lathe', which itself came from tornus, a lathe or turning tool, and ultimately from the Greek tornos, a tool for drawing circles. English took the verb in during the 1300s, originally with the literal sense of turning round or coming back to a place. From that physical idea the word branched out: the noun sense of a financial 'return' (money that comes back to an investor) appears by the 1500s, and the retail sense of goods sent back, along with the 'tax return' filed each year, are later commercial extensions. The spelling is reassuringly regular, which is why the only real uncertainty for writers is the unstressed first syllable, where 're-' can blur into a soft schwa sound.

How the word is built

• re- (back)
• turn (to rotate, to come round)
• -s (plural noun / third-person verb ending)