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spar

Pronunciation: /spɑː/

The English word “spar” has 14 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A rafter of a roof.
  2. A thick pole or piece of wood.
  3. A bar of wood used to fasten a door.
  4. Any linear object used as a mast, sprit, yard, boom, pole or gaff.
  5. A beam-like structural member that supports ribs in an aircraft wing or other airfoil.
  6. A sparring session; a preliminary fight, as in boxing or cock-fighting.
  7. A friend, a mate, a pal.
  8. Any of various microcrystalline minerals, of light, translucent, or transparent appearance, which are easily cleft.
  9. Any crystal with readily discernible faces.

verb

  1. To bolt, bar.
  2. To supply or equip (a vessel) with spars.
  3. To fight, especially as practice for martial arts or hand-to-hand combat.
  4. To strike with the feet or spurs, as cocks do.
  5. To contest in words; to wrangle.

Etymology

From Middle English sparre (“spar, rafter, beam”) (noun), sparren (“to close, bar”) (verb), from Middle Dutch sparre or Middle Low German Sparre, all ultimately from Proto-Germanic *sparrô (“stake, beam”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)par- (“beam, log”). Compare Dutch spar (“balk”), German Sparren (“rafter, spar”), Danish sparre (“spar”), Albanian shparr, shpardh (“kind of oak”). Perhaps also…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.