Yards

How to spell yards

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce yards

What does yards mean?

1. nounEnclosed pieces of ground next to buildings, often paved or fenced.
2. nounUnits of length each equal to three feet or about 0.91 metres.

Yards in a sentence

• The railway company keeps spare carriages in its sidings and yards.

• The tailor ordered several yards of grey wool for the suits.

• Children played in the back yards behind the terraced houses.

• The long jumper cleared almost eight yards in the final.

Where does yards come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word carries two strands that both reach back to Old English. The measurement sense descends from 'gerd' or 'gyrd', which meant a thin stick, rod, or staff, and later a fixed length measured by such a rod; that is why a yardstick is literally a stick of standard length. The enclosure sense comes from a different but related Old English word, 'geard', meaning a fenced piece of ground, which shares ancestry with 'garden' and with the '-gard' in 'Asgard'. Over the centuries the two words fell together in spelling and pronunciation, so the single form 'yard' now covers both ideas. The plural simply adds '-s', and because both senses are old and native, the spelling has stayed plain and phonetic with no silent traps.

How the word is built

• yard (Old English geard: enclosure / gerd: rod, measure)
• -s (plural)