Teeth

How to spell teeth

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce teeth

What does teeth mean?

1. nounThe hard white structures in the jaws used for biting and chewing food; the plural of tooth.

Teeth in a sentence

• The dentist said her teeth were in excellent condition.

• Brushing your teeth twice a day helps prevent decay.

Where does teeth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Teeth is the irregular plural of tooth, and both forms descend from the same Old English word toth. That came from a shared Germanic ancestor, reconstructed as tanth, which is also the source of Dutch tand and German Zahn, and it traces back to an even older Indo-European root meaning the part that bites or eats. The reason the plural is teeth rather than tooths is a sound change called i-mutation, an early Germanic process in which a now-vanished plural vowel pulled the original back vowel forward, turning the singular vowel into the front vowel we hear today. This is the very same pattern that gives us foot and feet, goose and geese, and man and men. The doubled e in the modern spelling marks that long ee sound, which is the main thing a writer needs to recall to avoid spelling it as teath or teith.

How the word is built

• tooth (root, singular)
• vowel change (i-mutation plural; no -s suffix)