Summons

How to spell summons

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce summons

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does summons mean?

1. nounAn official document ordering a person to appear before a court or other authority.
2. verbTo order a person, by formal legal notice, to appear before a court.

Summons in a sentence

• noun

  The court issued a summons requiring him to appear in March.

• verb

  The council can summons a landlord who breaches the safety rules.

• noun

  She ignored the parking summons and the fine doubled.

• verb

  Prosecutors decided to summons both directors over the unpaid tax.

Where does summons come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb summonere, which literally meant 'to remind quietly' or 'to give a private hint', formed from sub- (under, secretly) and monere (to warn or advise). In Roman usage the sense drifted toward openly calling someone forward, and that idea of an official call carried into Old French as the noun somonse, an order to appear. English took it up in the early 1300s in exactly its modern legal sense: a written command to come before a court. The same monere root sits inside familiar relatives such as 'monitor', 'admonish', and 'premonition', all of which involve warning or reminding. A useful spelling note is that the final -s is part of the singular noun itself, inherited from that French somonse, which is why the plural becomes the slightly surprising 'summonses' rather than just adding one s.

How the word is built

• summon- (from Latin summonere: to call, remind privately)
• -s (noun ending, from Old French somonse)