Servicemen

How to spell servicemen

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce servicemen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does servicemen mean?

1. nounMen serving in the armed forces, such as the army, navy, or air force.

Servicemen in a sentence

• The charity sends care packages to servicemen stationed overseas.

• Returning servicemen were offered priority housing after the war.

Where does servicemen come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a compound of two very different ancestors. The first half, 'service', descends from the Latin servitium, which literally meant the condition or duty of a serving slave, built on servus, meaning 'slave' or 'servant'; English took it through Old French as servise during the 1100s, and over the centuries it broadened from menial duty to helpful work of all kinds, including military duty. The second half is the thoroughly native English 'man', from Old English mann, which forms its plural irregularly as 'men' by an ancient vowel change rather than by adding -s. The blend 'serviceman' arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe a member of the armed forces, and its plural simply pluralises the 'man' element to 'men'. The spelling trap is purely in that ending: writers who reach for a regular plural may wrongly type 'servicemans', when the correct form mutates man to men.

How the word is built

• service (from Latin servitium: condition of a slave, duty)
• -men (Germanic plural of man)