Yard

How to spell yard

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce yard

What does yard mean?

1. nounA piece of enclosed ground next to or around a building.
2. nounA unit of length equal to three feet, or about 0.91 metres.

Yard in a sentence

• The children played in the back yard after school.

• She bought a yard of fabric for the curtains.

• He parked the trailer in the builder's yard overnight.

• The receiver gained one more yard before the tackle.

Where does yard come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English gyrd, which meant a thin rod, a stick, or a straight branch, and by extension a fixed measuring stick. The same Germanic ancestor lies behind the Dutch gard and German Gerte, all describing a slender rod. Two distinct modern meanings grew from that single image: the rod used to measure became the unit of length we still call a yard, while a separate but related Old English word geard, meaning an enclosure or fenced piece of ground, gave us the yard outside a house. Over centuries these two streams converged on the same spelling, which is why one short word covers both a measurement and an enclosed plot. The link back to a measuring rod is a useful memory hook for the simple, unchanged spelling.

How the word is built

• yard (from Old English gyrd: a rod, stick, or measure of length)