Turf

How to spell turf

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce turf

What does turf mean?

1. nounThe surface layer of soil bound together by grass and its roots, often cut into pieces and laid down.
2. nounAn area that a person or group regards as their own domain or area of control.

Turf in a sentence

• The groundsman rolled fresh turf across the bare patches of the pitch.

• The two departments argued for weeks over whose turf the project belonged to.

• After the drought the turf in the back garden turned brown and brittle.

• The older salesman guarded his turf and resented any newcomer taking his clients.

Where does turf come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Turf comes straight from the Old English word turf, which described a slab of earth held together by the matted roots of grass, in other words a piece of sod cut from the ground. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close relatives in Dutch turf and German Torf, both of which usually mean peat, the dried earth once dug up and burned as fuel. The shared ancestor traces back to a root meaning a lump or layer of soil, which is why turf has always carried the sense of the living top layer of ground rather than bare earth. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for more than a thousand years, which is unusual and is part of why it looks so plain and short today. By the 1700s turf had also become shorthand for horse racing, since races were run on grass, giving phrases like 'the turf'. The modern slang sense of one's own territory grew naturally out of the idea of a patch of ground that belongs to you.

How the word is built

• turf (whole word, from Old English turf: a slab of earth bound by grass roots); no prefix or suffix