Treaties

How to spell treaties

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce treaties

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does treaties mean?

1. nounFormal written agreements between two or more states or governments.

Treaties in a sentence

• The two nations signed several treaties to end the long border dispute.

• Historians studied the peace treaties that reshaped Europe after the war.

Where does treaties come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of treaty, a word that travelled into English from the Anglo-French treté and the Old French traitié during the 1300s. Behind those forms lies the Latin tractatus, meaning a handling, a managing, or a discussion, which was itself formed from the verb tractare, 'to handle or deal with'. That verb was a frequentative of trahere, 'to drag or draw', the same deep root that gives us 'tract', 'trace', and 'attract'. A treaty, then, began life as something 'dealt with' or negotiated between parties, and over time narrowed to the modern sense of a formal agreement between states. The spelling trap appears in the plural: because the singular ends in a consonant plus -y, the y turns to i and -es is added, giving 'treaties', not the look-alike 'treatise', which is an entirely separate word for a written essay.

How the word is built

• treat- (from Latin tractare: to handle, deal with)
• -y (noun suffix)
• -es (plural; the -y becomes -ies)