Taxes

How to spell taxes

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce taxes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does taxes mean?

1. nounCompulsory payments levied by a government on income, goods, or property.
2. verbImposes a charge on something, or places a heavy demand on a person's resources.

Taxes in a sentence

• noun

  Property taxes rose sharply across the whole county this year.

• verb

  The government taxes fuel at a higher rate than most other goods.

• noun

  She set aside part of every paycheck to cover her income taxes.

• verb

  A long commute really taxes his patience by the end of the week.

Where does taxes come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb taxare, which meant to assess, to evaluate, or to handle, and was itself a frequentative form of tangere, meaning to touch. The sense moved from touching and handling toward appraising the value of something, and from there to the official reckoning of what someone owed the state. English took the word in through Old French taxer during the 1300s, first as a verb for fixing a charge and soon after as the noun for the charge itself. The same Latin root tangere also gives us tangent, contact, and tactile, all carrying that core idea of touching. The plural and verb form simply add -es because the singular already ends in the sibilant x sound, and that extra syllable, pronounced 'iz', is exactly what trips writers who want to write 'taxs'.

How the word is built

• tax (from Latin taxare: to assess)
• -es (plural/third-person ending)