Ranch

How to spell ranch

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ranch

What does ranch mean?

1. nounA large farm, especially in North America, used for raising cattle, horses, or sheep.
2. verbTo run or work on a ranch, raising livestock for a living.

Ranch in a sentence

• noun

  The family ranch raised several hundred head of cattle.

• verb

  His grandparents chose to ranch in the dry hills outside town.

• noun

  They spent the summer working on a remote ranch in Montana.

• verb

  They decided to ranch rather than take office jobs in the city.

Where does ranch come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

Ranch comes from the American Spanish word rancho, which described a small farm or a group of people who lived and ate together at a rural settlement. That Spanish noun grew out of the verb rancharse, meaning to lodge or to be quartered, which itself traces back to the Old French ranger, meaning to arrange in a row or to establish in place; the same French root sits behind the English word range. English speakers in the American Southwest picked up rancho from Mexican Spanish in the early 1800s as cattle country expanded, and the spelling was clipped and anglicised to ranch. The word soon broadened from the cattle station itself to the act of running one, and in the twentieth century it lent its name both to a single-storey house style and to a creamy salad dressing first made on a working ranch in California. Because the word is short and phonetic, the only mild trap is remembering it ends in the soft -ch rather than -tch.

How the word is built

• ranch (from Spanish rancho: a group who eat together, a camp or small farm)