Haul

How to spell haul

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce haul

What does haul mean?

1. verbTo pull or drag something heavy with effort, often over a distance.
2. nounA quantity of something obtained, caught, or stolen at one time.

Haul in a sentence

• verb

  The movers had to haul the piano up three flights of stairs.

• noun

  The burglars made off with a haul of jewellery and cash.

• verb

  We hired a trailer to haul the firewood back to the cabin.

• noun

  The trawler returned to port with a record haul of cod.

Where does haul come from?

Language of origin: French

Haul began life in English as 'hale', a verb meaning to pull or drag forcefully, which English took from the Old French 'haler', meaning to pull or to tow a boat with a rope. The French verb was itself borrowed from a Germanic source, related to the Frankish and Old Dutch 'halon', meaning to fetch or to draw towards oneself; the same Germanic root survives in modern Dutch 'halen', to fetch. Around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English sailors began respelling the word as 'haul' to capture the long vowel sound, and the nautical sense of dragging on ropes and rigging cemented that spelling. From the heavy physical act of pulling, the noun sense grew to mean the quantity of fish dragged up in a net, and then any amount gathered or seized, as in a thief's haul. That same sense of dragging over distance gives us 'a long haul'. The 'au' spelling, rather than the 'a' of its twin word 'hall', is the lingering fingerprint of that sailing-era respelling.

How the word is built

• haul (single root; a 16th-century respelling of earlier 'hale', meaning to pull or drag)

Words that sound like haul

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

• hall: A large room or building used for public gatherings, meetings, or events.