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yard

Pronunciation: /ˈjɑːd/

The English word “yard” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A small, usually uncultivated area adjoining or (now especially) within the precincts of a house or other building.
  2. The property surrounding one's house, typically dominated by one's lawn.
  3. An enclosed outdoors area designated for a specific purpose, e.g. on farms, railways etc.
  4. A place where moose or deer herd together in winter for pasture, protection, etc.
  5. One’s house or home.
  6. A unit of length equal to 3 feet in the US customary and British imperial systems of measurement, equal to precisely 0.9144 m since 1959 (US) or 1963 (UK).
  7. Units of similar composition or length in other systems.
  8. Any spar carried aloft.
  9. A long tapered timber hung on a mast to which is bent a sail, and may be further qualified as a square, lateen, or lug yard. The first is hung at right angles to the mast, the last two hang obliquely.
  10. A branch, twig, or shoot.
  11. A staff, rod, or stick.
  12. A penis.
  13. 100 dollars.
  14. The yardland, an obsolete English unit of land roughly understood as 30 acres.
  15. The rod, a surveying unit of (once) 15 or (now) 16+¹⁄₂ feet.
  16. The rood, area bound by a square rod, ¹⁄₄ acre.
  17. A tall, slender, hollow receptacle or tool.
  18. 10⁹, A short scale billion; a long scale thousand millions or milliard.

verb

  1. To confine to a yard.
  2. To move a yard at a time, as opposed to inching along.

Etymology

From Middle English yerd, yard, ȝerd, ȝeard, from Old English ġeard (“yard, garden, fence, enclosure”), from Proto-West Germanic *gard, from Proto-Germanic *gardaz (“enclosure, yard”), from Proto-Indo-European *gʰórdʰos, from Proto-Indo-European *gʰerdʰ- (“to enclose”). See also North Frisian guard, Guart (“garden, yard”), Dutch gaard, gaarde (“garden, yard”), German Garten (“garden, yard”),…

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