Therapies

How to spell therapies

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce therapies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does therapies mean?

1. nounTreatments intended to relieve or heal a physical, mental, or emotional condition.

Therapies in a sentence

• The clinic offers several therapies for chronic back pain.

• Modern cancer therapies combine surgery, drugs, and radiation.

Where does therapies come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word descends from the Greek therapeia, which meant 'healing', 'service', or 'attending to' someone, built on the verb therapeuein, 'to attend, to wait on, to treat medically', and ultimately on theraps, 'an attendant'. Latin took the term as therapia, and it surfaced in English by the seventeenth century as 'therapy', meaning the medical treatment of disease or disorder. The plural 'therapies' simply follows the usual English rule for nouns ending in a consonant plus -y: the y becomes i before -es. Over time the word broadened well beyond physical medicine to cover psychological and emotional treatment, giving us a wide family of relatives such as 'therapist', 'therapeutic', and 'hydrotherapy'. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle vowel and the -ies ending, since the base 'therapy' quietly swaps its y for i before the plural suffix.

How the word is built

• therap- (from Greek therapeia: healing, attendance)
• -y (noun suffix)
• -ies (plural of -y)