Keel

How to spell keel

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce keel

What does keel mean?

1. nounThe central structural beam running along the bottom of a ship, from which the hull is built up.
2. verbTo tip, capsize, or collapse suddenly, as a ship rolls onto its side.

Keel in a sentence

• noun

  The boat's keel scraped against a sandbar in the shallow harbour.

• verb

  The exhausted runner began to keel over just past the finish line.

• noun

  A deep keel keeps a sailing yacht stable in heavy seas.

• verb

  The dizzy passenger looked ready to keel over on the swaying deck.

Where does keel come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Keel comes into English from Old Norse kjolr, the word for the long ridge or backbone running along the underside of a boat, which Scandinavian seafarers brought to Britain during the Viking age. The Old Norse term shares its ancestry with related Germanic words such as Dutch kiel and German Kiel, all describing the lowest structural timber of a vessel. By Middle English the word had settled into its modern sense of the central spine on which a ship's frame is built, the part that gives a hull its strength and stability. From that solid, weight-bearing image came the familiar figurative phrase to keel over, meaning to tip or topple as a ship rolls when its keel rises out of the water. The spelling is pleasingly regular: a double e for the long vowel and a single l, mirroring sister words like 'reel' and 'peel', so the trap is mostly just remembering it is not spelt with the 'ea' of 'real'.

How the word is built

• keel (single Germanic root meaning the ridge along a ship's bottom); no prefix or suffix