Since

How to spell since

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce since

What does since mean?

1. prepositionIn or during the period after a particular past time and continuing to now.
2. conjunctionFor the reason that; seeing that.

Since in a sentence

• preposition

  She has worked at the firm since 2015.

• conjunction

  Since the office was closed, the team worked from home.

• preposition

  Since the move to the city, his commute has been much shorter.

• conjunction

  We cancelled the trip since the flights were too expensive.

Where does since come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This little word has a surprisingly tangled past. It descends from the Old English siþþan, meaning roughly 'after that' or 'from then on', which was itself built from sið (later, after) and þon or þan (then). In Middle English this collapsed into forms such as sithen and sithence, and the trailing sound was eventually respelled with -ce, much as the old word 'sithens' settled into the spelling we know. By the late 1400s the shortened form 'since' had taken hold for both the time sense (counting forward from a past moment) and the causal sense (for the reason that). The shift from the bulky sithence to the trim since explains why the modern spelling looks nothing like its Old English root, and why the ending is -ce rather than the plain -s a speaker might expect.

How the word is built

• sin- (from Old English siþþan, after that)
• -ce (adverbial -s ending, later spelled -ce)