Sheets
nounBroad, thin, flat pieces of a material, or the large cloths used to cover a bed.
How to spell sheets
6 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce sheets
What does sheets mean?
- nounBroad, thin, flat pieces of a material, or the large cloths used to cover a bed.
Sheets in a sentence
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She changed the bed sheets every Sunday morning.
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The printer ran out of paper, so he fed in fresh sheets.
Where does sheets come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Sheets is the plural of sheet, which descends from the Old English sceat or scete, words tied to scieta meaning a piece of cloth, a corner, or a lap. The deeper root is a Germanic stem meaning 'to shoot' or 'to project', and the cloth sense seems to have grown from the idea of a flap or jutting corner of fabric. Over the centuries the word broadened from cloth bedding to any thin, flat, broad expanse, so a sheet of paper, a sheet of glass, and a sheet of ice all share the same ancestor. Curiously, the sailing term 'sheet', the rope that controls a sail, comes from a related Old English word for the corner of a sail, which is why a ship adrift can be described as 'three sheets to the wind'. The spelling has been stable since Middle English, and the double 'ee' simply marks the long vowel.
How the word is built
- sheet (from Old English scet: cloth, covering)
- -s (plural)
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