Wharf

How to spell wharf

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce wharf

What does wharf mean?

1. nounA solid structure built along the water's edge where ships tie up to load and unload cargo or passengers.

Wharf in a sentence

• The cargo ship stayed moored at the wharf overnight.

• Crates of fish were stacked along the wharf at dawn.

Where does wharf come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Wharf comes straight from the Old English hwearf, which meant a bank, a shore, or an embankment, and which was tied to the verb hweorfan, 'to turn' or 'to move about', so the original sense was something like a place where people and goods turned up and moved around at the water's edge. It belongs to the wider Germanic family, with close relatives in the Dutch werf and the German Werft, both still used today for a shipyard or dockyard. The early spelling kept that distinctive hw- cluster, which English later reordered into the modern wh-, the same shuffle that turned hwaet into 'what' and hwael into 'whale'. By the medieval period the word had narrowed to its now-familiar meaning, a solid landing place built along the bank where vessels tie up to load and unload cargo. The silent h tucked after the w is the real spelling trap, because the word is simply pronounced 'worf', giving no clue that the h is hiding there at all.

How the word is built

• wharf (single root from Old English hwearf: an embankment, shore, or bank built up at the water's edge)