Wings

How to spell wings

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wings

What does wings mean?

1. nounThe paired limbs or rigid structures that birds, insects, or aircraft use to fly.
2. nounThe areas at either side of a stage, hidden from the audience, where performers wait.

Wings in a sentence

• The eagle spread its wings and lifted off the cliff.

• The actors waited nervously in the wings for their cue.

• Engineers inspected the wings of the jet before the flight.

• The stage manager signalled from the wings to begin the scene.

Where does wings come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This word comes from Old Norse, where the singular form was vaengr, meaning the feathered limb of a bird, with the plural vaengir. Scandinavian settlers brought it into the north of England during the Viking age, and by the 1100s it had largely replaced the older native English term, fether or fethra, for a bird's flight limb. The original Old Norse root carried the sense of something that beats or fans the air, which fits its everyday use perfectly. Over the centuries the meaning broadened from birds and insects to the airfoils of aircraft, the side parts of a building, and the offstage areas of a theatre. The spelling stays delightfully simple: the base wing plus a plain -s, with no hidden letters to trip up a writer.

How the word is built

• wing (limb for flight)
• -s (plural suffix)