Sum

How to spell sum

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sum

What does sum mean?

1. nounA total amount, especially of money, or the result of adding numbers together.
2. verbTo add numbers or amounts together to find a total.
3. nounA simple problem in arithmetic, especially one set as an exercise.

Sum in a sentence

• noun

  The final sum on the invoice was higher than the estimate.

• verb

  The spreadsheet can sum each column automatically.

• noun

  The pupil worked through a tricky sum during the maths lesson.

• noun

  He inherited a substantial sum from his late aunt.

• verb

  Accountants sum the monthly receipts before filing the report.

• noun

  She checked her answer to the long division sum twice.

Where does sum come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin summa, meaning 'the top' or 'the highest part', which was the feminine form of the adjective summus, 'highest'. The link to arithmetic is wonderfully concrete: Roman accountants added a column of figures from the bottom upward and wrote the total at the very top, so the 'highest' line literally became the result of the addition. The word travelled into English through Old French somme around the year 1300, keeping both the idea of a total and the broader sense of an amount of money. It is the same root that gives us 'summit', the highest point of a mountain, and 'summary', which gathers the main points into a top-level whole. The spelling trap is purely aural: 'sum' sounds exactly like 'some', so the difficulty is choosing the right word rather than the right letters.

How the word is built

• sum (from Latin summa, 'the top, the total'); a single root with no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like sum

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• some: An unspecified amount or number of something.