Sails

How to spell sails

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sails

What does sails mean?

1. nounThe sheets of strong fabric spread to catch the wind and drive a boat forward.
2. verbTravels across water in a boat or ship, often under wind power.

Sails in a sentence

• noun

  The crew lowered the sails as the storm approached.

• verb

  The ferry sails across the harbour every hour.

• noun

  The yacht's white sails filled with wind and the hull picked up speed.

• verb

  She sails her small dinghy along the coast each summer.

Where does sails come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English 'segl', the name for the sheet of cloth that catches the wind on a boat, a noun shared across the Germanic languages and seen in the Dutch 'zeil' and German 'Segel'. The root is thought to go back to a Proto-Germanic form meaning a piece of cloth that is cut, which fits the way a sail is shaped from panels of canvas. The verb sense, 'to travel by water under sail', grew naturally out of the noun and was already in use in Old English. Over centuries the spelling settled on 'sail' with the 'ai' vowel, which is exactly what creates the trap, because it sounds identical to the unrelated word 'sales' meaning transactions. Keeping the boat link in mind ('a ship has a sail') is the surest way to choose the right spelling.

How the word is built

• sail (Old English segl: a sheet of fabric that catches wind)
• -s (plural / third-person verb suffix)

Words that sound like sails

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• sales: The activity of selling goods or services, or the quantity sold over a period.