Today Israelis typically use the word דבר to mean “thing” (as in דברים יפים לראות – Beautiful Things to See), but its original biblical meaning is “word”. Today the more common word for “word” is מילה , which also appears in Biblical Hebrew.
The word in context:
הוא לא נותן לי להשחיל מילה!
He doesn’t let me get a word in!
Words are מילים :
תודה על המילים היפות!
Thank you for the nice words!
Did you notice that יפות ends in the feminine ות-, while מילים ends in the masculine ים-? That’s because even though מילה in the plural has a masculine ending, מילה itself is feminine in grammatical gender, so any word describing it in the plural will end with the feminine ות-.
