ills
SayILZ/ɪlz/
- 1Plural of ill.
The new mayor promised to tackle the city's deep-rooted social ills.
Economists disagree about the root causes of the nation's economic ills.
Note
A plural formed from the countable uses of ill, where the noun names troubles, harms, wrongs and ailments that can be listed one by one. It most often gathers social, economic or systemic problems (the city's ills, the nation's ills) rather than bodily sickness, which the singular and the adjective tend to carry. The US slang use for the drug PCP is a mass noun with no plural, so this form never means it.
ills is a form of ill
ill, noun: A bodily ailment or illness. Full entry
- Forms
- illills plural
- Spelling
- ill → ills: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /z/.
Use it in a sentence
Write your own sentence with ills, and AI will tell you whether it fits and which meaning you used.