Word.ws English Dictionary

facies

/ˈfeɪ.ʃi.iːz/US/ˈfeɪ.ʃiˌiz/

facies noun: general appearance. Also the plural of facie.

Noun

facies (countable and uncountable, plural facies)

  1. General appearance.
    • The insects of these four islands have also a common facies - facts which seem to indicate that some more extensive land has recently disappeared from the area they now occupy, and has supplied them with a few of its peculiar productions.1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 106
    • The Chilean Amphijubula Schust. (Schuster, 1970a) which has the facies of a small Frullania and agrees with Frullania in leaf insertion and branching, has a nontiered seta with 16 epidermal cell rows surrounding 4 inner rows.1992, Rudolf M[athias] Schuster, The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America: East of the Hundredth Meridian, volume V, Chicago, Ill.: Field Museum of Natural History, →ISBN, page 6
  2. Facial features, like an expression or complexion, typical for patients having certain diseases or conditions.
    • costive facies
  3. A body of rock with specified characteristics reflecting its formation, composition, age, and fossil content.

Also used as

facies is also the plural of facie.

Examples of facies in a sentence

  • Pansies are still poking their little facies around every mailbox and birdbath forsythia is blooming, too!
  • Vent facies on the north and eastern sides of Fish Lake are mostly flows and breccias of andesite and rhyodacite.
  • The Yuli Belt is dominantly composed of greenschist facies, often highly carbonaceous quartz-mica schists with blocks of metabasites up to blueschist facies (Fig. 2).

All 11 example sentences with facies

Forms of facies

pluralfacies

Plural of facies: facies

Origin of facies

Borrowed from Latin faciēs (“form, configuration, figure; face, visage, countenance”). Doublet of face.

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

Words formed from facies

Phrases with facies

Words that rhyme with facies

Questions about facies

What does facies mean?
Facies means general appearance.
What part of speech is facies?
Facies is a noun.
How do you pronounce facies?
Facies is pronounced /ˈfeɪ.ʃi.iːz/ (UK).
What is the plural of facies?
The plural of facies is facies.

Words near facies in the dictionary

  1. facienda
  2. faciends
  3. faciendum
  4. facient
  5. facients
  6. facies
  7. facies Hippocratica
  8. facil
  9. facile
  10. facilely
  11. facileness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: facies (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-facies.wav.

Cite this entry: “facies.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/facies. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.