summers

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of summer.

   The town hosts an outdoor festival every year, and the warmest summers draw the biggest crowds.

   Several long, dry summers left the reservoir dangerously low.

   Note

   Counting summers is one of the poetic ways English gives an age. A girl of sixteen summers is sixteen years old, a usage that leans literary or playfully humorous and usually describes someone young. The plural also serves quieter senses, such as the horizontal beams builders call summers. The same spelling belongs to the verb for spending the season and the American adverb.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of summer.

   Every year the painter summers in a quiet fishing village along the coast.

   The herd summers on the high pasture before being driven down for winter.

   Note

   Being intransitive, it takes no direct object. Someone summers somewhere, and the sentence usually feels incomplete without the place: summers in a fishing village, summers by the lake. The usual picture is a holiday spot or a seasonal residence, so the verb suits people with a second home or a regular retreat.

3. 3
   adverbUS

   During the summer; in the summertime, typically of something done each year.

   Summers, the old lighthouse keeper guided tourists along the cliffs for extra income.

   She waits tables summers and takes classes the rest of the year.

   Oppositewinters

   Note

   An American adverb that drops the preposition and article altogether: she waits tables summers means she does so every summer. It marks a habit rather than one particular season, and it sits at the end of a clause or at the front, set off by a comma. Outside the US, in summer or every summer is the safer choice. It never takes more or most.

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