Beach

How to spell beach

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce beach

What does beach mean?

1. nounA stretch of sand or pebbles along the edge of the sea, a lake, or a river.
2. verbTo drive, haul, or run a boat or marine animal up onto the shore.

Beach in a sentence

• noun

  The family spread their towels on the warm sand of the beach.

• verb

  The crew had to beach the dinghy before the tide went out.

• noun

  A row of striped deckchairs lined the beach near the pier.

• verb

  Rescuers tried to refloat the whale before it could beach on the sand.

Where does beach come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The origin of beach is genuinely murky, which is unusual for such an everyday word. It surfaced in English only around the 1530s, at first meaning the loose, water-worn shingle and pebbles found along a shoreline rather than the sandy expanse we now picture. Many scholars connect it to a dialect word from the south-west of England and possibly to Old English bæce or bece, meaning a stream or brook, the idea being the gravelly bed where flowing water meets the land. From naming the pebbly material it widened to mean the whole shore between the tides, and by the 1600s it had taken on its modern sense. The verb, to drive or haul a boat up onto the shore, grew naturally out of the noun. Because the genuine history is uncertain, the spelling has no helpful Latin or Greek logic; the only reliable trap is the homophone beech, the tree, which sounds identical but is a separate Old English word.

How the word is built

• beach (single root, no affixes; a free-standing noun later used as a verb)

Words that sound like beach

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

• beech: A large deciduous tree with smooth grey bark, glossy leaves, and small edible nuts, or the pale hard timber it produces.