Barrow

How to spell barrow

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce barrow

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does barrow mean?

1. nounA small handcart with one or two wheels and two handles, used for moving loads.
2. nounAn ancient burial mound made of earth or stones, covering one or more graves.

Barrow in a sentence

• He wheeled the barrow full of bricks across the garden.

• Archaeologists excavated a Bronze Age barrow on the hilltop.

• The market trader sold fruit from a wooden barrow on the corner.

• The long barrow contained the bones of several people and pottery fragments.

Where does barrow come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Barrow is really three Old English words that happened to end up spelled the same. The wheelbarrow sense descends from Old English 'bearwe', a frame or basket for carrying, which is related to the verb 'beran' meaning 'to bear' or 'to carry', so a barrow is literally a thing you bear loads in. The ancient-mound sense comes from a separate Old English word, 'beorg', meaning a hill or heap of earth, a relative of the German 'Berg' (mountain). The third sense, a castrated boar, comes from yet another word, Old English 'bearg', a Germanic term for a gelded pig. Because all three lost their distinct endings over centuries, modern English writes them identically, even though they are entirely unrelated in meaning. The spelling trap is the doubled 'r' followed by '-ow', which mirrors close cousins like 'marrow' and 'narrow'.

How the word is built

• barrow (a single root; from Old English bearwe 'a carrying frame', beorg 'mound', and bearg 'pig', which all converged on this spelling)