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PlainSpell

feces

/ˈfiːsiːz/noun

feces is a noun meaning “Digested waste material (typically solid or semi-solid) discharged from a human or other mammal's stomach to the intestines” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-E-C-E-S and has 2 syllables, and it appears 1.7 times per million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does feces mean?

noun

  1. 1

    CanadaUSDigested waste material (typically solid or semi-solid) discharged from a human or other mammal's stomach to the intestines.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce feces?

  • /ˈfiːsiːz/

Feces has 2 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-feces.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of feces

  • faeces

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is feces?

Feces appears 1.7 times per million words in written English, the 21,798th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Words people confuse with feces

Word pairs people search, with the monthly searches for “a vs b” (G: Google, B: Bing, United States).

faeces vs feces210 G

Also written: faeces.

Sources: Google and Bing searches (September 2025 to August 2026, through DataForSEO); English Wiktionary (homophones, alternative spellings).

Feces in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense digested waste material discharged from the bowels:

LanguageWords
Frenchfèces, excrément
GermanFäkalien, Kot
Portuguesefezes, excremento
Spanishheces, feca

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does feces come from?

From Latin faecēs, nominative plural of faex (“residue, dregs”), further origin unknown; possibly borrowed from a substrate language.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).