Anchorage

How to spell anchorage

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce anchorage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does anchorage mean?

1. nounA place where ships may safely drop anchor and lie at rest.
2. nounThe act of holding something firmly in place, or a charge paid for the right to anchor.

Anchorage in a sentence

• The harbour offers a sheltered anchorage for fishing boats.

• The port authority charges a small anchorage on every vessel that stays overnight.

• The captain steered the vessel toward the deep-water anchorage beyond the reef.

• The engineers checked the anchorage of the cables before the bridge opened.

Where does anchorage come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is built on 'anchor', which travelled into Old English as ancor, borrowed from the Latin ancora, a hook-shaped device for holding a ship fast to the seabed. The Latin term itself came from the Greek ankura, meaning a bend or a hook, from a root sense of 'bending' that also lies behind 'angle'. The curious 'h' in 'anchor' was not in the original Latin or the early English spelling; scribes inserted it later, mistakenly imitating Greek words spelled with a 'ch', and that decorative letter is exactly the spot that trips modern writers. To 'anchor' the noun, English added the productive suffix -age, which builds words for a place, an action, or a charge, much as it does in 'storage' and 'mileage'. The result first named the place where ships safely drop anchor and later widened to cover the act of anchoring and any fee paid for the privilege.

How the word is built

• anchor (from Latin ancora: a hook for holding a ship)
• -age (noun suffix denoting place, state, or action)