stops

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular present of stop.

   The train stops at every small village along the route.

   He always stops by the bakery on his way home.

   Note

   Here the -s marks agreement, not number. It appears only with he, she, it or a singular noun, while I, you, we and they take bare stop. The form carries the verb's two patterns: intransitive, with nothing after it (the music stops), and transitive, with an object (she stops the car). It shares its spelling with the plural noun.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of stop.

   The tour includes several stops at historic landmarks downtown.

   The old pipe organ has dozens of stops that change its tone.

   Note

   A regular plural, made by adding -s, and it covers every concrete use of the noun: the marked places where buses and trains halt, the breaks in a journey, and the pins, blocks and pawls that arrest a machine's motion. The same spelling is also a verb, so let the sentence decide: in "the bus stops here" it is a verb, in "two bus stops" a noun.

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