Offshore

How to spell offshore

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce offshore

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does offshore mean?

1. adjectiveSituated or operating in the sea at some distance from the coast.
2. adjectiveBased or registered in a foreign country, often one with lower taxes or lighter regulation.
3. verbTo relocate a business process or jobs to another country, usually to cut costs.

Offshore in a sentence

• adjective

  The company built a huge offshore wind farm a few miles out from the beach.

• adjective

  Investigators traced the money to an offshore account in the Caribbean.

• verb

  The board decided to offshore much of its customer support to save money.

• adjective

  Workers were flown by helicopter to the offshore oil platform.

• adjective

  The firm set up an offshore company to reduce its tax bill.

• verb

  Manufacturers began to offshore production as labour costs at home rose.

Where does offshore come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound formed from two old native words: 'off', which goes back to Old English 'of' meaning 'away from', and 'shore', which entered Middle English from a Low German or Dutch source (compare Middle Dutch 'schore') referring to the land bordering a body of water. Put together, 'offshore' literally means 'away from the shore', and it appears in English from around the early 1700s, first as a nautical term describing winds and waters lying out from the coast. Over time it broadened to describe anything situated at sea, such as fishing grounds, oil rigs, and wind farms. In the twentieth century it picked up a financial sense, since money or businesses placed 'offshore' were located in another country across the water, often a small island used as a tax haven. Because both halves are plain everyday words written exactly as they sound, the only real spelling decision is remembering that it is a single closed compound with a doubled 'ff'.

How the word is built

• off (away from)
• shore (the land along the edge of a sea or lake)