turf
/tɝf/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.76 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "Miss Thorn began digging up the turf with her lofter: it was a painful moment for me. ¶ “You might at least have tried me, Mrs. Cooke,” I said."
- "It was a sixth successive defeat for Klopp in a major final and at the final whistle, with Karius burying his face into the turf, there was not exactly a stampede of team-mates wanting to console him."
- ""It's an old custom the people had when they bought and sold land. They used to cut out a clod and hand it over to the buyer, and you weren't lawfully seised of your land - it didn't really belong to you - till the other fellow had actually given you a piece of it - like this." He held out the turves."
- "Frodo and Sam went forward and saw that amidst the clamorous host were set three high-seats built of green turves."
- "In ordinary peat-bogs, however, where turves are cut, there is always a large percentage of waste peat resulting from the digging, drying or transport of the turves, which can be utilized only by moulding it."
- "[…] the fireman has to divide his time between getting up into the bunker to throw more turfs into the cab, and getting down on his hands and knees to get it into the firebox, and even then a reserve supply of turf must be carried on a truck behind the engine, and stops must be made on each steep ascent to raise more steam."
Etymology
From Middle English turf, torf, from Old English turf (“turf, sod, soil, piece of grass-covered earth, greensward”), from Proto-West Germanic *turb (“turf, peat”), from Proto-Germanic *turbz (“turf, lawn”), from Proto-Indo-European *derbʰ- (“tuft, grass”). Cognates Cognate with Scots turr, truff (“turf, peat”), Dutch turf (“turf”), Middle Low German torf (“peat, turf”) (whence German Torf and German Low German Torf), Danish tørv (“peat”), Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish torv (“turf”), Norn *torv (“peat”), French tourbe (“peat”), Finnish turve (“turf”), Lithuanian darbas (“bunch of leaves”), durpės (“peat”), Sanskrit दर्भ (darbhá, “a type of grass”), दूर्वा (dū́rvā, “bent grass”). Not cognate with Danish torv (“square, market, marketplace”), which is instead inherited from Old Norse torg (“marketplace”), from Old East Slavic търгъ (tŭrgŭ, “trade, trading, commerce, trade square”), ultimately from Proto-Slavic *tъ̑rgъ (“merchandise, commodity, wares”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *derbʰ-, turf, *turb, *turbz
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /tɝf/
- British English: /tɜːf/