Singles

How to spell singles

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce singles

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does singles mean?

1. nounPeople who are not married or in a romantic relationship, considered as a group.
2. nounA match played between two individual players, rather than between pairs.
3. nounIndividual songs released separately rather than as part of an album.
4. nounOne-dollar banknotes, especially when needed in small change.

Singles in a sentence

• The cruise line runs special events aimed at singles over forty.

• She reached the final of the women's singles at the regional tournament.

• The band put out three singles before recording a full album.

• The vending machine only takes singles, so keep some on hand.

• The bar became popular with singles looking to meet new people.

• He prefers singles because he can rely entirely on his own play.

Where does singles come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'single', which English took from Old French 'sengle' or 'single' in the 1300s, itself descended from the Latin 'singulus', meaning 'one at a time' or 'individual'. That Latin word belongs to a family of distributive numerals and is related to 'simplus', the source of 'simple', so the underlying idea has always been 'just one, on its own'. From the original sense of 'one only' the word branched in many directions: an unmarried person standing alone, a record carrying one main song, a hit that reaches one base in baseball, and a one-dollar bill. The spelling keeps the soft 'g' from the French and Latin forms, and the silent-looking 'le' ending is simply the regular English way of writing that final syllable. Because the root is so transparent, 'singles' is rarely misspelled, though writers sometimes hesitate over whether the final sound is spelled 'les' or 'els'.

How the word is built

• single (from Latin singulus: one, individual)
• -s (plural/third-person marker)