Posse - posses - possess - possesses

Posse, posses, possess or possesses are words that are easy to mis-type - and the spellchecker will not notice your mistakes.

In academic English, you are most likely to want the verb 'to possess' or the third person singular of its [[present possesses, the third person singular of the present tense. This word is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, 'perzESS[iz]' IPA: /pəz ˈɛs [ə (or ɪ) z]/; it means, roughly, "to own". Note the spelling, with two double '-s-'s: possess is one of the 117 mis-spellings listed as 'Common difficulties' in the section on 'Spelling' within 'Writing' in UEfAP.

Posse (and its plural, posses) is a rarer word in academic English. It is pronounced with a stressed first syllable, 'POSSie'. Its most usual use in English is as the name of a group of volunteers formed to help a sheriff or other lawman in a Western film; it is in essence part of American English.

Do not confuse either of these with either the noun posy (plural posies), or the verb 'to pose. Posy is pronounced with a single syllable containing a long vowel (like 'oh') and a 'z' sound. It means "a (small) bunch of flowers". 'To pose' means:

• transitively 'to put forward', 'to propound' - usually a question or a theory; and
• intransitively, 'to assume a position', either for a photograph or painting, etc, or as a style or attitude - 'to pretend to be a certain sort of person': "he posed as an expert on Shakespeare, but he had only read two plays."