Spar
verbTo box or trade blows lightly for practice, or to argue in a brisk, good-natured way.
How to spell spar
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce spar
What does spar mean?
- verbTo box or trade blows lightly for practice, or to argue in a brisk, good-natured way.
- nounA strong pole, such as a mast or boom, used to support or extend a ship's sail.
Spar in a sentence
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verb
The two boxers spar for a few rounds before the real bout.
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noun
The storm snapped the main spar clean in two.
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verb
The committee members often spar over budget details.
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noun
The crew lashed the sail to the wooden spar before dawn.
Where does spar come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The word spar actually gathers together several roots that happen to share a spelling. The nautical sense, a stout pole that supports a sail, comes from a northern Germanic source related to the Old Norse sparri and the Middle Low German sparre, both meaning a rafter or wooden beam, and it has been in English since at least the 1300s. The fighting sense, to make sparring motions or to trade blows lightly, is murkier; it was first used of gamecocks striking with their spurs and may come from an Old French verb esparer meaning to kick out, before it broadened to mean a practice fight between boxers and then any brisk verbal exchange. A third sense names a glassy, easily split mineral such as feldspar, borrowed from the German Spat. Because all of these collapsed into one tidy four-letter spelling, spar is one of those rare words that is much easier to write than to define.
How the word is built
- spar (single root; no productive prefix or suffix)
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