Mortar

How to spell mortar

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mortar

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mortar mean?

1. nounA workable paste of cement, sand, lime and water that hardens to bind bricks or stones together.
2. nounA hard bowl in which substances are crushed or ground using a pestle.
3. nounA short, stubby gun that fires shells at a steep, high-angle trajectory.

Mortar in a sentence

• The bricklayer spread a thin layer of mortar along each course.

• She crushed the garlic and salt together in a heavy stone mortar.

• The soldiers set up a mortar behind the ridge to fire over the wall.

• Old mortar between the stones had crumbled and needed repointing.

• The pharmacist ground the tablets to powder using a brass mortar.

• Each mortar shell arced high before dropping onto the target.

Where does mortar come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin mortarium, which named both a heavy bowl used for crushing and grinding ingredients and the soft mixture that was pounded inside it. That double meaning travelled together into English, arriving partly through Old English and partly reinforced by Old French mortier around the 1200s. The building sense, the wet paste of lime or cement that binds bricks and stones, grew naturally from the idea of a substance worked and mixed in such a vessel. The military sense, a short stubby gun that lobs shells at a high angle, came later, in the 1600s, because the squat weapon was thought to resemble the shape of the grinding bowl. The unstressed second syllable, an -ar that sounds like a vague 'er', is the spelling trap, since writers are tempted to finish the word with -er or -or.

How the word is built

• mortar (from Latin mortarium: a vessel for pounding, and the paste pounded in it)