Ferry

How to spell ferry

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ferry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ferry mean?

1. nounA boat or ship that carries passengers and vehicles across a body of water on a regular route.
2. verbTo transport people or goods, especially across water or back and forth over short distances.

Ferry in a sentence

• noun

  The ferry to the island leaves every hour from the harbour.

• verb

  A small launch will ferry the workers to the oil rig each morning.

• noun

  We drove the car onto the ferry and crossed the channel.

• verb

  Volunteers agreed to ferry guests between the hotel and the venue.

Where does ferry come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Ferry traces back to the Old English verb ferian, meaning 'to carry, convey, or transport', which was closely tied to faran, 'to travel or go', the same root that gives us 'fare' and 'wayfaring'. This belonged to a wide Germanic family, and Old Norse ferja, a boat used for crossing water, reinforced the sense of a vessel that carries people and goods over a river or strait. By the late medieval period the word had settled into the meaning of both the act of conveying across water and the boat that does it. The deep link to motion explains why a 'ferry' is fundamentally about carriage rather than the craft itself, and why the same family produced 'ferry' as a verb meaning simply to transport. The double 'r' and the plain '-y' ending are the small spelling points to watch, since the word looks and sounds close to 'fairy' in many accents.

How the word is built

• ferr- (from Old English ferian: to carry, convey)
• -y (noun/verb formation)

Words that sound like ferry

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

• fairy: A small imaginary creature with magical powers, usually shown with wings.