Stakes

How to spell stakes

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stakes

What does stakes mean?

1. nounThe money or things risked on the outcome of an event, or more broadly the importance of what could be won or lost.
2. nounPointed wooden or metal posts driven into the ground to mark, support, or fasten something.

Stakes in a sentence

• The players raised the stakes until only two of them remained in the game.

• The surveyor drove wooden stakes into the soil to mark the property boundary.

• With the company's future on the line, the stakes in the negotiation could not have been higher.

• The gardener tied each young tomato plant to a row of bamboo stakes.

Where does stakes come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English staca, meaning a pointed stick or post driven into the ground, a sense still alive when we drive stakes to mark a boundary or support a plant. It belongs to the same Germanic family as the words 'stake', 'stick', and 'stockade', all built around the idea of something fixed firmly in place. The gambling and risk sense developed much later, around the 1500s, probably from the practice of placing a wager on a post or stake at the centre of play, so the money 'at stake' was literally money set down on the post. From there English broadened it to mean anything risked or to be won, giving us phrases like 'high stakes' and 'the stakes are rising'. Because the plural is pronounced exactly like 'steaks' (cuts of meat), the two are a frequent spelling trap, even though their roots are entirely unrelated.

How the word is built

• stake (from Old English staca: a pointed post)
• -s (plural)