Summers

How to spell summers

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce summers

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does summers mean?

1. nounMore than one summer; the warmest seasons of the year, or years counted as such.
2. verbSpends the summer somewhere; third-person singular form of the verb 'to summer'.

Summers in a sentence

• noun

  The last three summers have been unusually hot and dry.

• verb

  She usually summers on the coast and returns to the city each autumn.

• noun

  They spent many summers at the family cottage by the lake.

• verb

  The herd summers in the high meadows before moving down for winter.

Where does summers come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural and third-person form of 'summer', which descends directly from the Old English word sumor, the name for the warmest part of the year. That word goes back to a shared Germanic root, seen in the Dutch zomer and the German Sommer, and ultimately to an even older Indo-European root that some scholars connect to the idea of a 'half' or 'season' of the year. The spelling has been remarkably stable across the centuries, keeping its double 'm' from the Old English form. The plural 'summers' has long been used in a poetic way to count years of a person's life, as in someone being 'a child of seven summers'. Because the word is so old and native to English, it carries no Latin or French baggage; the only real spelling point is remembering the double 'm' and the plain '-s' ending.

How the word is built

• summer (warm season, from Old English sumor)
• -s (plural / third-person singular ending)