Lifeguard

How to spell lifeguard

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lifeguard

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lifeguard mean?

1. nounA person employed to watch over swimmers at a pool or beach and rescue anyone in danger.

Lifeguard in a sentence

• The lifeguard blew a whistle when the children swam past the marker buoy.

• Every public pool in the town must have a qualified lifeguard on duty.

Where does lifeguard come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word lifeguard is a transparent English compound joining two native elements: 'life', which descends from the Old English 'lif' meaning the state of living, and 'guard', which came into English in the 1400s from the Old French 'garde', a noun for protection or watch built on the verb 'garder', to keep or watch over. In its oldest use a 'life-guard' was a bodyguard, a soldier or troop charged with guarding the life of a monarch or general, and that military sense appears in English from the 1640s. Over time the word shifted away from the battlefield and toward the water: by the 1800s a lifeguard was someone stationed at a beach or pool to rescue swimmers in danger of drowning. Because both halves are ordinary words, the spelling rarely trips writers up, though the temptation is to insert a space or hyphen rather than write it as one solid word.

How the word is built

• life (existence, living)
• guard (one who protects)