Fender

How to spell fender

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fender

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fender mean?

1. nounThe body panel of a car or bicycle that arches over a wheel to deflect mud, water, and road debris.
2. nounA cushion or bumper hung over the side of a boat to protect the hull against a dock or another vessel.
3. nounA low metal frame placed in front of a fireplace to keep coals and ash from spilling onto the floor.

Fender in a sentence

• The parked van scraped my front fender in the car park.

• She tied a rubber fender along the hull before mooring at the busy marina.

• A brass fender surrounded the hearth in the old drawing room.

• Rust had eaten through the rear fender above the tyre.

• The inflatable fender stopped the yacht from grinding against the harbour wall.

• An ember rolled out but the iron fender kept it off the rug.

Where does fender come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word grew out of the verb 'fend', itself a clipped form of 'defend', which English took from the Old French defendre and ultimately from the Latin defendere, meaning 'to ward off' or 'to strike away'. By the 1400s 'fend' had come to mean 'to keep off' or 'to protect against', and adding the agent suffix '-er' produced a name for anything whose job is to fend something off, that is, to absorb or block a blow. The earliest fenders were guards placed in front of a fireplace to keep falling coals and embers from rolling onto the floor. From there the sense spread naturally to the cushioning bumpers hung over a ship's side and, later, to the protective body panels over a vehicle's wheels. Knowing it is literally a 'fend-er', a thing that fends off, fixes the simple spelling: the everyday word 'fend' plus '-er', with no hidden letters.

How the word is built

• fend (to ward off, shortened from defend)
• -er (noun suffix: thing that does the action)