Wares

How to spell wares

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wares

What does wares mean?

1. nounGoods or articles offered for sale, especially those displayed by a trader.

Wares in a sentence

• The market trader laid out his wares on a folding table.

• Online sellers photograph their wares to attract more buyers.

Where does wares come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English noun waru, which meant goods, merchandise, or articles offered for trade. It belongs to a wider family of Germanic words for commercial goods, sharing an ancestor with the Dutch waar and the German Ware, both still meaning merchandise today. The same root survives inside compound words such as hardware, software, and earthenware, where 'ware' names a class of manufactured goods. The plural 'wares' has been used since the medieval period for the assorted items a trader sets out to sell. Because it sounds exactly like 'wears' (the verb) and very close to 'where's', the spelling trap lies entirely in choosing the right word, not in the letters themselves.

How the word is built

• ware (Old English waru: goods, merchandise)
• -s (plural)

Words that sound like wares

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• where's: A contraction of "where is" or "where has", asking or stating the location of something.