Strand

How to spell strand

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce strand

What does strand mean?

1. nounA single thin length of thread, hair, wire, or fibre, often twisted together with others.
2. verbTo leave someone in a difficult position without the means to move on or get away.

Strand in a sentence

• noun

  A loose strand of hair fell across her forehead.

• verb

  A cancelled flight can strand hundreds of passengers overnight.

• noun

  The rope frayed until only one strand still held.

• verb

  Heavy snow threatened to strand the whole village for days.

Where does strand come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Strand is an old native English word with two strands of history that happen to share a spelling. The 'shore' sense comes from Old English strand, meaning the land along the edge of the sea or a river, a word with close cousins across the Germanic languages including German Strand and the Scandinavian tongues. This is the strand preserved in London's famous street called the Strand, which once ran beside the Thames. The 'thread or fibre' sense appeared later, around the 1400s, and its origin is genuinely murky; it may relate to the idea of fibres twisted together into rope, possibly through Old French estran for a strand of rope, itself of Germanic stock. The verb 'to strand', meaning to drive a ship onto the shore and so to leave it helpless, grew directly out of the beach sense and later widened to mean leaving any person stranded. Because the word is short and phonetically regular, the only spelling care needed is the silent ending and the simple a, not the trickier traps of longer words.

How the word is built

• strand (a single thread or fibre; also an old word for shore), a native Germanic root used as both noun and verb