Berth

How to spell berth

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce berth

What does berth mean?

1. nounA place in a harbour or alongside a quay where a ship stops and is secured.
2. nounA fixed bed or bunk on a ship, train or sleeper carriage.
3. nounA safe amount of space kept clear of a hazard or person, chiefly in the phrase 'a wide berth'.

Berth in a sentence

• The cruise ship eased slowly into its berth at the terminal.

• She booked a lower berth on the overnight sleeper to Edinburgh.

• The cyclist gave the parked lorry a wide berth on the narrow lane.

• The harbour master assigned each yacht a numbered berth for the night.

• Each cabin had a narrow berth bolted to the wall.

• After the argument she gave her colleague a wide berth for a week.

Where does berth come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Berth is a nautical word that surfaced in English in the early 1600s, and its origins lie in the verb 'bear', which in sailors' speech meant to bear off or hold a vessel clear of something. The ending -th turned that action into a noun, on the same pattern that gave us 'girth' from 'gird' and 'width' from 'wide'. Its first recorded meaning was 'sea room', the safe distance a ship kept from rocks, shoals or another vessel, which is exactly the idea preserved in the phrase 'to give something a wide berth'. From that sense of safe space it came to mean the assigned place where a ship lies at anchor or alongside a quay, and then, by extension, a sleeping bunk fitted aboard a ship or railway carriage. Although it is spelled identically in feeling to 'birth', the two are unrelated: 'birth' descends from Old Norse and the act of being born, while 'berth' is built on 'bear' in its steering sense, and keeping that nautical story in mind helps fix the spelling.

How the word is built

• bear (nautical 'to bear off', keep clear)
• -th (noun-forming suffix, as in girth and width)