Bridge

How to spell bridge

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bridge

What does bridge mean?

1. nounA structure built to carry a road, path, or railway across a river, valley, or other obstacle.
2. verbTo connect two things or close a gap between them.
3. nounA card game for four players in two partnerships, played with a standard deck.

Bridge in a sentence

• noun

  The old stone bridge over the river was closed for repairs.

• verb

  The new training scheme aims to bridge the gap between school and work.

• noun

  My grandmother plays bridge at the club every Thursday afternoon.

• noun

  Traffic backed up for miles after a lorry broke down on the bridge.

• verb

  A short loan can help bridge the shortfall until payday.

• noun

  Learning to bid well takes years for a serious bridge player.

Where does bridge come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English brycg, which meant a built structure carrying a path over a river or ravine. It traces back to a Proto-Germanic form brugjo, the same ancestor that gave Dutch 'brug' and German 'Brucke', all sharing the basic sense of a raised crossing. Some scholars suspect a deeper kinship with words for a log or beam laid across water, since the earliest crossings were often simple timber causeways. The spelling settled with the 'dg' cluster that English uses to write the soft 'j' sound after a short vowel, the same pattern seen in 'ridge', 'edge' and 'badge'. The card game called bridge appears much later, in the late 1800s, and its name probably has nothing to do with crossings; it may come from an older game name (biritch) of disputed, possibly Russian or Turkish, origin.

How the word is built

• bridge (from Old English brycg: a structure spanning a gap); a single, indivisible native root with no prefix or suffix