Tragedies

How to spell tragedies

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce tragedies

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tragedies mean?

1. nounPlural of tragedy: terrible events causing great suffering, loss, or sorrow.
2. nounPlural of tragedy: serious dramatic plays in which the main character meets a disastrous end.

Tragedies in a sentence

• The report listed the road tragedies that happened over the holiday weekend.

• The course compares the great tragedies of Shakespeare with those of the ancient Greeks.

• Both novels deal with personal tragedies such as grief and sudden loss.

• She wrote her thesis on the staging of classical tragedies in modern theatres.

Where does tragedies come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word traces back to the Greek tragoidia, a strange compound that literally meant 'goat song', from tragos meaning 'goat' and oide meaning 'song' or 'ode'. Scholars still debate why a goat is buried inside it; the leading guesses are that a goat was the prize at the dramatic contests of ancient Athens, or that the chorus dressed as the goat-like companions of the wine god Dionysus. From those solemn Athenian plays the word passed into Latin as tragoedia and then into Old French as tragedie, reaching English in the late 1300s for a serious drama ending in disaster. The plural form drops the y and adds -ies, which is the spelling step that trips writers up. The same Greek oide ('song') also hides inside 'comedy', 'melody', and 'ode', so the buried word for song is more common than it looks.

How the word is built

• trag- (Greek tragos: goat)
• -ed- (from oide: song)
• -y (noun-forming suffix)
• -es (plural; y becomes i)