Thwart

How to spell thwart

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce thwart

What does thwart mean?

1. verbTo prevent someone from achieving something, or to block a plan from succeeding.
2. nounA structural crosspiece in a rowing boat that serves as a seat and braces the hull.

Thwart in a sentence

• verb

  Strict customs checks can thwart smugglers at the border.

• noun

  She sat on the wooden thwart and gripped both oars.

• verb

  Poor weather threatened to thwart the launch of the satellite.

• noun

  The old dinghy had a cracked thwart that needed replacing.

Where does thwart come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This word comes from Old Norse, where thvert was the neuter form of the adjective thverr, meaning 'transverse' or 'lying across'. It entered Middle English in the 1200s first as an adverb and preposition meaning simply 'across' or 'crosswise', which is why an old sailing or rowing boat still has a thwart, the plank seat that runs across the hull from side to side. From the idea of cutting across something came the figurative verb sense: to lie across someone's path and so block or frustrate their plans. The word is a Germanic cousin of related 'across' notions in the other Scandinavian languages, and the spelling preserves the awkward 'thw' opening that trips up writers who expect a smoother cluster. Because the modern verb meaning of obstructing feels so abstract, few people connect it any longer to its plain old sense of 'sideways'.

How the word is built

• thwart (from Old Norse thvert: across, crosswise), now a single unanalysable root