Winters

How to spell winters

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce winters

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does winters mean?

1. nounMore than one of the coldest season of the year.
2. verbSpends the winter season in a particular place.

Winters in a sentence

• noun

  The recent winters have been unusually mild and wet.

• verb

  My grandmother winters in Spain to escape the cold.

• noun

  Northern winters bring short days and long nights.

• verb

  The herd winters in the sheltered lower valley each year.

Where does winters come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural and third-person form of 'winter', a thoroughly native English word inherited from Old English 'winter', which named the coldest season of the year. The same root runs right across the old Germanic languages, appearing in Old Norse 'vetr' and in Old High German 'wintar', which suggests an ancestor shared by all those peoples. Scholars have long debated its deeper meaning: one popular idea links it to a root meaning 'wet', describing the rainy season, while another connects it to 'white', for the colour of snow. Either way the word has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years, with the spelling settling into the familiar 'winter' by the medieval period. The plural 'winters' has long been used poetically to count years of a person's age, as in someone being 'eighty winters old'.

How the word is built

• winter (Old English: the cold season)
• -s (plural noun / third-person verb suffix)