Successes

How to spell successes

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce successes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does successes mean?

1. nounInstances of achieving a desired aim or a favourable outcome.

Successes in a sentence

• The annual report celebrated the team's biggest successes of the year.

• A string of early successes gave the startup the confidence to expand.

Where does successes come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'success', which descends from the Latin successus, the past participle of succedere, a verb that literally meant 'to come after' or 'to go up close beneath', built from sub- ('up' or 'under') and cedere ('to go' or 'to yield'). In Latin the noun first carried the neutral sense of an outcome or a result, whether good or bad, before narrowing toward favourable outcomes specifically. English took it up in the sixteenth century, and for a while a 'success' could still mean any result; the modern restriction to a happy or prosperous outcome settled in over later centuries. The same cedere root surfaces in a whole family of English words such as 'proceed', 'recede', and 'concede', which is a useful reminder that the spelling carries a double c (the soft -cc-) followed by a double s. When you pluralise it the troublesome trap doubles up: the word ends in -sses, so 'successes' carries both the -cc- and the -ss- before its plural ending.

How the word is built

• suc- (variant of sub-: up, under)
• cess (from cedere: to go, to yield)
• -es (plural suffix)