Salaries

How to spell salaries

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce salaries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does salaries mean?

1. nounFixed regular payments made to employees in return for their work, typically expressed as an annual figure.

Salaries in a sentence

• The company froze all salaries during the downturn.

• Public sector salaries are reviewed every spring.

Where does salaries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin salarium, which was the allowance paid to a Roman soldier, and that noun was built directly on sal, the Latin word for 'salt'. The traditional explanation is that salt was a valued commodity and part of a soldier's pay was tied to buying it, so salarium came to mean a fixed periodic payment for service. The sense broadened in Latin to any regular stipend, and English took the word in through Old French (salarie) during the 1300s. Over time it settled into its modern meaning of a fixed wage paid for ongoing employment, usually monthly or annually rather than by the hour. The buried sal root is also why we still speak of someone being 'worth their salt', and remembering that salt connection helps fix the single 'l' and the 'ar' spelling, since the trap is the unstressed middle that tempts writers toward 'salery' or a doubled letter.

How the word is built

• salar- (from Latin salarium: salt money)
• -y (noun)
• -ies (plural)