Sales

How to spell sales

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sales

What does sales mean?

1. nounThe activity of selling goods or services, or the quantity sold over a period.

Sales in a sentence

• The company reported record sales for the final quarter.

• She works in sales for a software firm.

Where does sales come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'sale', which descends from Old English 'sala', meaning the act of selling, a sense reinforced by the Old Norse 'sala' that Scandinavian settlers brought to Britain. Both words trace back to the same Germanic root that gives us the verb 'sell', from Old English 'sellan', which originally meant simply 'to give' or 'to hand over' rather than specifically to exchange for money. Over the medieval period the financial meaning sharpened, and by the time commerce dominated the towns, a 'sale' clearly meant a transaction for payment. The plural 'sales' grew into a collective term for trading activity, then for the department that conducts it and the totals it records. The spelling trap is purely aural: 'sales' sounds identical to 'sails', the cloth on a boat, so the meaning alone must guide the writer to the commercial 'a'.

How the word is built

• sale (from sellan: to give, hand over)
• -s (plural suffix)

Words that sound like sales

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

• sails: The sheets of strong fabric spread to catch the wind and drive a boat forward.