Timber

How to spell timber

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce timber

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does timber mean?

1. nounWood prepared or used for building and carpentry.
2. interjectionA shouted warning that a felled tree is about to fall.

Timber in a sentence

• noun

  The builders ordered fresh timber for the roof beams.

• interjection

  The lumberjack yelled timber as the great pine began to topple.

• noun

  The old barn was framed with heavy oak timber.

• interjection

  A loud cry of timber echoed through the woods before the crash.

Where does timber come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Timber comes straight from Old English timber, which originally meant a building or a structure rather than the wood itself; the related verb timbran meant 'to build'. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with relatives such as German Zimmer 'room' and the surname element seen in Zimmermann 'carpenter', and it traces back to a Proto-Germanic root meaning a dwelling or the material used to make one. Over time the sense narrowed from 'the act or product of building' to 'the wood prepared for building', which is how we use it today. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years, keeping its plain -ber ending. The main modern trap is confusing it with the unrelated French loanword 'timbre', which describes the quality of a musical sound and ends in -bre.

How the word is built

• timber (Old English: building material, wood) - treated as a single root with no separable affixes