Lumber

How to spell lumber

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lumber

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lumber mean?

1. nounTimber sawn into planks and boards, ready for building or carpentry.
2. verbTo move in a slow, heavy, awkward manner.

Lumber in a sentence

• noun

  The contractor ordered a fresh load of lumber for the deck.

• verb

  The old tractor would lumber across the field at walking pace.

• noun

  Prices for lumber rose sharply after the storm damaged the mills.

• verb

  She watched the bear lumber toward the river without any urgency.

Where does lumber come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Lumber is a word with two strands that are tricky to untangle, which is why its history is told with some caution. The verb sense, meaning to move in a slow, heavy, clumsy way, appears in Middle English as lomeren and is probably of Scandinavian origin, related to dialect words in the Nordic languages for moving sluggishly or making a rumbling noise. The noun meaning of disused furniture and odds and ends stored out of the way seems to grow from this idea of awkward, cumbersome stuff, though some have linked it playfully to Lombard, since Lombard bankers and pawnbrokers kept rooms full of unredeemed goods. In American English the noun shifted by the 1660s to mean sawn timber, the bulky wooden boards that clutter a yard, and that became its dominant meaning across North America. The British still use the older sense of useless clutter, as in a lumber room, and the verb survives everywhere for a heavy, plodding gait. Because the senses diverge so much by region, the single tidy spelling hides a surprisingly tangled past.

How the word is built

• lumber (single root; in the timber sense from a verb meaning to move heavily, the wood being awkward to handle)

Words that sound like lumber

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

• lumbar: Relating to the lower part of the back, between the ribs and the pelvis.