mails

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of mail. Chiefly in "the mails," the postal system; mail meaning letters and packages is usually uncountable.

   Federal law makes it a crime to use the mails to carry out a fraud.

   The catalog reached customers through the mails long before online shopping.

   Note

   A plural that only some senses of the noun allow. When mail means the letters reaching one address, American usage keeps it uncountable: the mail came late, not the mails came late. The plural belongs to the countable senses, such as mailbags, separate consignments of post, or, in a dated use, the coaches, trains and ships that carried it. The mails as a name for the whole system is its own American idiom.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of mail.

   The office mails invoices to clients at the end of each quarter.

   Whenever the gallery sells a print, it mails a certificate of authenticity.

   Note

   The present-tense form used in sentences like she mails her sister a parcel. Most of its senses are ditransitive, so it takes either two objects or a to-phrase: mails him the contract, mails the contract to him. When it means contacting someone by email, it can take just the person (she mails her manager). The same form also serves the armorer's sense, to arm with mail, and the sense to pinion. Its spelling is shared with the noun plural.

3. 3
   nounUSwith the

   The postal system regarded as a whole, through which letters and parcels are collected and delivered.

   Tampering with items moving through the mails is a federal offense.

   During the strike, businesses could no longer count on the mails for timely shipments.

   Similarpost

   Note

   An American idiom built on the plural. The mails, almost always with the article, names the whole postal machinery rather than any particular letters. It differs from the mail, which in the same variety means what arrives at your door. In phrases such as through the mails and by the mails, the system is treated as a channel that things travel along.

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