Shipyard

How to spell shipyard

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shipyard

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shipyard mean?

1. nounAn area beside water where ships are built, repaired, or maintained.

Shipyard in a sentence

• The old shipyard on the river now builds luxury yachts.

• Hundreds of workers were laid off when the shipyard closed.

Where does shipyard come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent native compound built from two old Germanic words. The first element, 'ship', comes from the Old English scip, the general word for a seagoing vessel, with relatives across the Germanic languages. The second element, 'yard', comes from the Old English geard, meaning an enclosure or piece of ground around a building, the same root that gives us 'orchard' and 'garden'. Joined together, the compound named the enclosed waterside ground where ships are built and repaired. The pairing became common in English from around the seventeenth century as shipbuilding grew into an organised industry, and the spelling has stayed simple because both halves are familiar everyday words.

How the word is built

• ship (vessel, from Old English scip)
• yard (enclosed ground, from Old English geard)