Stories

How to spell stories

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce stories

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stories mean?

1. nounPlural of story: accounts of events, real or imagined, told for information or entertainment.
2. nounPlural of story in the American and Canadian sense: the horizontal levels or floors of a building.

Stories in a sentence

• The children begged for two more stories before bed.

• The new office tower rises forty stories above the street.

• The magazine prints true stories about ordinary people.

• The apartment block is only three stories tall.

Where does stories come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'story', which came into English in the 1200s from the Anglo-Norman and Old French 'estorie', itself from the Latin 'historia', meaning an account or a narrative of events. The Latin word was borrowed in turn from the Greek 'historia', which meant 'inquiry' or 'knowledge gained by investigation', and which also gives us the separate word 'history'. Over time 'story' narrowed to mean any narrative, true or invented, while 'history' kept the sense of the recorded past. In American usage 'story' (plural 'stories') also names a floor of a building, a sense thought to come from medieval rows of painted windows or pictures that told a tale across each level; British and Canadian writers usually spell that building sense 'storey', plural 'storeys'. The trap in 'stories' is simply the y-to-ies change that all words ending in consonant plus y undergo.

How the word is built

• stor- (from Latin historia: account, narrative)
• -ies (plural of words ending in consonant
• y)

British and American spelling

Stories is the American spelling. British English spells it storeys.