Surf

How to spell surf

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce surf

What does surf mean?

1. verbTo ride on the breaking waves of the sea, typically standing on a board.
2. nounThe mass of foamy water created when waves break on a shore.
3. verbTo move casually from page to page or site to site on the internet.

Surf in a sentence

• verb

  Every summer they drive to the coast to surf at dawn.

• noun

  The children chased each other through the cold surf on the beach.

• verb

  She likes to surf the web for recipes after dinner.

• verb

  He learned to surf on a beach holiday in Cornwall.

• noun

  White surf crashed against the rocks below the cliff path.

• verb

  During the long flight he could not surf the internet at all.

Where does surf come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

Surf is a word whose origins are genuinely murky. It first appears in English around the late 1600s, written as 'suffe', and used by sailors and traders to describe the swell and breaking foam of the sea along a coast, especially the heavy surge encountered off the shores of India. The spelling soon shifted to 'surf', a change that may have been encouraged by the existing English word 'surge', meaning to rise and swell, which carries a closely related sense. Some scholars suspect the original 'suffe' was borrowed from an Indian language during the era of seaborne trade, but no firm source has ever been pinned down. The modern verb sense of riding waves on a board grew naturally from the noun in the twentieth century, and the figurative 'surf the internet' sense arrived only in the 1990s. Because the true root is unknown, the spelling simply has to be memorised, and the fact that it sounds exactly like 'serf', the medieval bonded labourer, makes it a classic trap.

How the word is built

• surf (single root; no prefix or suffix)