Sweets

How to spell sweets

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sweets

What does sweets mean?

1. nounSmall sugary items of confectionery, such as toffees, boiled candies, and chocolates.

Sweets in a sentence

• The children spent their pocket money on a bag of sweets at the corner shop.

• The dentist warned him that eating too many sweets was rotting his teeth.

Where does sweets come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English adjective 'swete', meaning pleasing or agreeable to the taste, which itself goes back to a shared Germanic ancestor and ultimately to an Indo-European root for sweetness that also produced the Latin 'suavis' (agreeable) and 'suadere' (to advise or urge gently, literally to make something pleasant). For most of its life 'sweet' was an adjective, but by using it as a noun and adding the plural ending, English speakers, especially in Britain, came to call sugary confectionery 'sweets' from the nineteenth century onward. The spelling kept its early 'ee' vowel, the same pattern seen in 'meet' and 'feet', which is worth noting because the word is a perfect homophone of 'suites' (sets of rooms or furniture), where the sound is spelled entirely differently. Remembering that 'sweets' shares its core with the adjective 'sweet' is the cleanest way to avoid drifting toward the unrelated 'suites'.

How the word is built

• sweet (Old English swete: pleasing to the taste)
• -s (plural)