firms

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of firm.

   Accounting firms across the country reported strong earnings this quarter.

   The merger combined two of the largest engineering firms in Europe.

   Note

   One plural serves every noun sense of firm. It covers a trading partnership and the name it trades under, a usage marked as British, and any business enterprise however it is organized. In slang it also means a criminal gang built around football hooliganism. Context tells these apart. Context also separates this plural from the obsolete roofing word, which has the same spelling but names rafters.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of firm.

   The trader watches closely as the currency firms against the dollar.

   She firms the clay base carefully before shaping the bowl.

   Note

   The present-tense form serves both a transitive and an intransitive verb. With an object, it means making something solid, compact or securely fixed. Without one, it means steadying or recovering after a decline, which is the sense used of prices and currencies. In Australia, betting odds are said to firm when they shorten. Colloquially, someone firms an ordeal by gritting their teeth and pushing through it.

3. 3
   nounobsolete

   The principal rafters of a roof, especially a matched pair considered together as the chief support of the structure.

   Note

   A builder's word from the framing of roofs, now obsolete. It names the chief rafters, and especially two of them treated as a single working unit. A reader is likely to meet it only in older writing about building. In present-day prose, "principal rafters" or "a pair of rafters" says the same thing plainly. Nothing in the spelling sets it apart from the plural of the business word.

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