Spies

How to spell spies

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce spies

What does spies mean?

1. nounMore than one person who secretly gathers information, especially for a government or rival organisation.
2. verbObserves or watches someone secretly; present tense used with he, she, or it.

Spies in a sentence

• noun

  The agency trained dozens of spies during the war.

• verb

  She often spies on the rival shop to compare its prices.

• noun

  The novel follows two spies working behind enemy lines.

• verb

  The suspicious neighbour spies on everyone through the curtains.

Where does spies come from?

Language of origin: French

This word traces back to the verb 'spy', which English took from the Old French 'espier', meaning 'to watch' or 'to observe secretly'. That French verb was itself of Germanic origin, and it is ultimately connected to the same ancient root that gave Latin 'specere', 'to look at', the source of words like 'spectacle' and 'inspect'. The noun sense, a person who secretly gathers information, grew naturally out of the idea of one who watches unseen. The plural and the present-tense verb form both end in '-ies' because of a regular English spelling rule: a final 'y' after a consonant turns into 'ie' before the '-s'. That same rule turns 'fly' into 'flies' and 'try' into 'tries', so 'spy' becomes 'spies'.

How the word is built

• spy (one who watches secretly)
• -es (plural / third-person ending, with y changing to ie)