Mast

How to spell mast

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mast

What does mast mean?

1. nounA tall upright pole on a ship that supports the sails and rigging, or any similar tall structure carrying flags or antennas.

Mast in a sentence

• The sailor climbed the mast to repair the rigging.

• A new radio mast now towers over the hillside.

Where does mast come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The shipping sense of mast comes straight from Old English mæst, the upright pole that carried a vessel's sail, and it has close cousins across the Germanic languages, including Dutch and German Mast. The form has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years, which is why it remains one short, blunt syllable today. As technology changed, the word stretched naturally from a wooden ship's spar to any tall upright structure, so a steel radio or television mast is simply the old word doing a new job. There is also a quite separate Old English mæst meaning the nuts of forest trees, such as beech and acorns, gathered as food for pigs; that second word is linked to an ancient root for food and is the source of the term beechmast. Because both words shrank to the same tidy spelling, mast is one of those rare English words where two unrelated meanings ended up sharing an identical, easy form.

How the word is built

• mast (single root, from Old English mæst meaning a pole or spar)