Witnesses

How to spell witnesses

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce witnesses

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does witnesses mean?

1. nounPeople who have seen or experienced an event and can give an account of it, especially in a legal setting.
2. verbSees or observes an event happen, or formally attests a document by signing it.

Witnesses in a sentence

• noun

  Several witnesses described the collision to the investigating officers.

• verb

  Anyone who witnesses the accident must report it to the police.

• noun

  The prosecutor called three reliable witnesses to the stand.

• verb

  The notary witnesses each signature before stamping the form.

Where does witnesses come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word traces back to the Old English witnes, which meant 'knowledge, testimony, or attestation' and was built on the verb witan, meaning 'to know'. The same ancient root gave us 'wit' in the sense of intelligence and the old phrase 'to wit', and it is a cousin of words across the Germanic languages tied to knowing and seeing. Over time the abstract sense of 'testimony' narrowed to mean the person who provides it, so a witness became someone who knows something firsthand and can attest to it. The plural and the third-person verb form add -es because the base word already ends in the hissing -ss sound, and English inserts that extra syllable to make it pronounceable. The double s in the middle, inherited from the -ness suffix, is the spot most likely to trip a writer up, since only one of the two s sounds belongs to the suffix.

How the word is built

• wit (knowledge, from witan 'to know')
• -ness (state or condition)
• -es (plural / third-person ending)