Berg

How to spell berg

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce berg

What does berg mean?

1. nounA large floating mass of ice broken off from a glacier; a shortened form of iceberg.

Berg in a sentence

• The lookout spotted a towering berg drifting toward the shipping lane.

• The research vessel circled the berg to measure how much ice lay below the surface.

Where does berg come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

This short word traces back to a Germanic root meaning 'mountain' or 'high mass', preserved almost unchanged in modern Dutch and German as 'berg'. English absorbed it chiefly through the Dutch compound 'ijsberg', literally 'ice mountain', which was borrowed in the 1700s and anglicised as 'iceberg'. Over time English speakers casually clipped 'iceberg' down to 'berg', especially among sailors and in polar exploration writing. The same 'berg' element survives in place names and surnames across northern Europe, such as Heidelberg and countless German family names ending in -berg. In South African English the word also stands on its own to mean a mountain, drawn directly from Afrikaans, which itself descends from Dutch. The spelling is phonetically tidy, so the only real trap is remembering it ends in a hard '-g' rather than the softer endings English speakers sometimes expect.

How the word is built

• berg (Dutch/Germanic root meaning 'mountain' or 'mass'); in English a clipped form of 'iceberg'