Wives

How to spell wives

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wives

What does wives mean?

1. nounThe plural of wife: the women to whom people are married.

Wives in a sentence

• The soldiers wrote letters home to their wives every week.

• Both men brought their wives to the company dinner.

Where does wives come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wives is the plural of wife, a thoroughly native English word that comes from the Old English wif, meaning simply 'woman' or 'female', before it narrowed to mean a married woman. The same root produced the now archaic 'wifman', literally 'woman person', which itself collapsed over time into the modern word 'woman'. The spelling shift from wife to wives reflects a long-standing pattern in Germanic English where a final voiceless f turns into a voiced v before a plural ending, the same change you hear in knife and knives, leaf and leaves, and life and lives. This sound change was once written out faithfully by scribes, which is why the v appears in the spelling rather than just the pronunciation. The word has been in continuous use since before the year 1000, making it one of the oldest layers of the language, and the f-to-v plural is the one detail writers most often need to remember.

How the word is built

• wif (wife)
• -es plural, with f softened to v before the ending