Other forms: sums, summed, summing
A sum is what you get when you add numbers together. Two and two give a sum of four; the three bills on the table came to a sum of ninety pounds.
In British English a sum is also the piece of arithmetic itself — children do sums at school, and getting your sums wrong means the figures do not add up. A sum of money is simply an amount: a large sum, the sum of four thousand pounds, a tidy sum. The verb sum up means to summarise, and "to sum up" is how a speaker signals the last paragraph; a judge's summing-up comes before the jury retires. In sum means the same thing in a stiffer suit. And keep the sound-alikes apart: sum is arithmetic, some is a quantity.
1nounsumThe total reached by adding numbers together.~85%
“The sum of the first ten numbers is fifty-five.”
2nounamountAn amount of money.~11%
“They paid a substantial sum for the strip of land behind the house.”
3nounsimpleA simple piece of arithmetic.~2%
“He did the sums on the back of the receipt.”
4verbexpressTo express the whole of something briefly, nearly always as sum up.~2%
“She summed up the meeting in two sentences and left.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
sum is a result of adding.
Latin summa meant "highest point" as well as "sum", and it comes from summus, "highest". The total was the top of the thing — the figure standing above everything that was added to reach it. Old French had it as summe, Middle English borrowed that shape, and the word wore down to the three letters it has now.
Latin
summa — highest point; sum
Old French
summe
Middle English
summe
English, today
sum
Built from
From Middle English summe, from Old French summe, from Latin summa (“highest point; sum”), from summus (“highest”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA