Steps

How to spell steps

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce steps

What does steps mean?

1. nounMore than one footfall, stair, or stage in a sequence.
2. verbMoves the foot to walk or to enter a place, used for he, she, or it.

Steps in a sentence

• noun

  The front steps were slippery after the overnight frost.

• verb

  He always steps carefully over the loose paving stone.

• noun

  She outlined the four steps needed to finish the audit.

• verb

  The manager steps in whenever a customer raises a complaint.

Where does steps come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English noun stæpe and the related verb steppan, which meant 'to tread' or 'to set the foot down'. Those forms came from a common Germanic root that also gave Dutch its 'stap' and German its 'stapfen', all describing the act of placing one foot ahead of the other. From the literal motion of walking, the noun extended naturally to the raised surfaces we tread on, the 'steps' of a staircase, and then figuratively to the stages of any process. The spelling is refreshingly transparent: it simply adds the regular '-s' ending, with no doubling or silent letter to trip the writer. Because step belongs to the oldest layer of everyday English, it has kept the same blunt, single-syllable shape for well over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• step (Old English stæpe: a pace or footfall)
• -s (plural / third-person singular ending)