Surgeries

How to spell surgeries

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce surgeries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does surgeries mean?

1. nounMore than one medical operation involving cutting into the body to treat injury or disease.
2. nounIn British usage, the rooms or buildings where general practitioners see and treat patients.
3. nounIn British usage, regular sessions at which a politician or professional meets people individually to hear their concerns.

Surgeries in a sentence

• The hospital performs hundreds of surgeries every month.

• Several local surgeries have closed because of staff shortages.

• The MP holds weekly surgeries in the community hall.

• Both surgeries on her knee were successful.

• The town's two surgeries share an out of hours phone line.

• Residents raised the parking problem at one of his surgeries.

Where does surgeries come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is the plural of 'surgery', a word that travelled a long and twisting road into English. Its ultimate source is the Greek 'kheirourgia', literally 'hand-work', built from 'kheir' meaning 'hand' and 'ergon' meaning 'work'; the original idea was simply doing something with the hands. Latin reshaped it as 'chirurgia', and Old French worn it down to 'cirurgie' or 'surgerie', which is the form English borrowed in the 1300s. Over time the spelling lost the hard classical 'chir-' and settled into the familiar 'surg-', which is exactly why the connection to its 'hand' origin is now invisible. The plural simply adds '-es' after the '-y' becomes '-ie', a regular but easily fumbled English ending.

How the word is built

• surg- (from chirurgia: hand-work, healing by hand)
• -ery (noun suffix denoting practice or place)
• -es (plural)