Bail

How to spell bail

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bail

What does bail mean?

1. nounMoney lodged with a court to secure the temporary release of an accused person until their trial.
2. verbTo scoop water out of a boat to stop it sinking.

Bail in a sentence

• noun

  The judge set bail at fifty thousand pounds.

• verb

  The crew began to bail frantically as the dinghy took on water.

• noun

  His family raised the cash to post bail before the weekend.

• verb

  They used an old bucket to bail the flooded hull.

Where does bail come from?

Language of origin: French

Bail is a small word that hides several different histories under one spelling. The legal sense came into English in the late 1300s from Old French bail, meaning 'custody' or 'guardianship', which traced back to the Latin verb bajulare, 'to carry a burden or bear responsibility'; a person who stood bail was literally taking on the burden of guaranteeing another's appearance in court. The verb meaning to scoop water out of a boat is a separate strand, recorded from the 1600s and rooted in the Old French baille, a bucket, again from a Latin word for a water carrier. The cricketing bail, the little crosspiece resting on the stumps, comes from yet another Old French word for a crossbar or barrier. Because all of these collapsed into the single spelling 'bail', the real trap for writers is the homophone 'bale', meaning a bound bundle of hay or cotton, which sounds identical but belongs to a wholly different family.

How the word is built

• bail (single root; no prefix or suffix)

Words that sound like bail

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• bale: A large, tightly bound bundle of material such as hay, straw, cotton, wool, or recycling.