Barge

How to spell barge

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce barge

What does barge mean?

1. nounA long, flat-bottomed boat used mainly for carrying freight on rivers and canals.
2. verbTo move forcefully or rudely, pushing past people or into a space.

Barge in a sentence

• noun

  The loaded barge moved slowly along the canal toward the warehouse.

• verb

  He tends to barge into meetings without knocking on the door.

• noun

  A tug hauled the coal barge under the old stone bridge.

• verb

  Do not just barge past the queue when the doors open.

Where does barge come from?

Language of origin: French

The word arrived in English in the 1200s through Old French 'barge', which itself descended from the Late Latin 'barga' or 'barca', a word for a small boat or ship's tender. Linguists trace the Latin form back, with some uncertainty, to a Mediterranean nautical vocabulary, possibly with Egyptian or Coptic 'baris' (a kind of boat) in the deeper background. In its earliest English use a barge was a small sailing vessel, and only later did it settle into the modern sense of a long, flat-bottomed boat used for carrying freight on rivers and canals. The lively verb meaning 'to push in clumsily or rudely' is a much later, nineteenth-century development, borrowing the image of a heavy, unstoppable barge shoving its way through water. The same Latin 'barca' also gave us 'barque' and, by a longer route, the Spanish-derived 'embark', all sharing that boat-bound ancestry.

How the word is built

• barge (single root from Latin barca: small boat); no separable prefix or suffix