Taxis

How to spell taxis

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce taxis

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does taxis mean?

1. nounMore than one taxi; licensed cars hired with a driver to carry passengers.

Taxis in a sentence

• Three taxis waited in a line outside the hotel entrance.

• The city licensed two hundred new taxis this year.

Where does taxis come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This single spelling actually lands on two different stories. As the plural of 'taxi', it traces back to the taximeter, a device that measured the fare; that 'taxi-' element comes through French from medieval Latin taxa, meaning a charge or tariff, itself from Latin taxare 'to assess or value'. The scientific and medical noun 'taxis', by contrast, was borrowed directly from the Greek taxis, which literally meant 'arrangement, order, or positioning', built on the verb tassein 'to arrange or put in order'. In nineteenth-century biology that Greek sense of orderly positioning was applied to the directed movement of an organism toward or away from a stimulus, giving us compounds such as phototaxis and chemotaxis. The same Greek root also underlies 'tactics' and 'syntax', both of which are fundamentally about putting things in order. Because the plural 'taxis' sounds almost identical to 'taxes', the money sense, the two are easy to confuse on the page.

How the word is built

• taxi (short for taximeter cab)
• -s (plural); the scientific sense is the Greek noun taxis 'arrangement, order' borrowed whole