sand
/sænd/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.44 in modern English
5
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Rock that is ground more finely than gravel, but is not as fine as silt (more formally, see grain sizes chart), forming beaches and deserts and also used in construction.
Uncountable
noun
Rock that is ground more finely than gravel, but is not as fine as silt (more formally, see grain sizes chart), forming beaches and deserts and also used in construction.
Countable
Example Sentences
- "For a spell we done pretty well. Then there came a reg'lar terror of a sou'wester same as you don't get one summer in a thousand, and blowed the shanty flat and ripped about half of the weir poles out of the sand."
- "“We are addicted to sand but don’t know it because we don’t buy it as individuals,” says Aurora Torres, […]"
- "China’s hunger for sand is insatiable, its biggest dredging site at Lake Poyang produces 989,000 tonnes per day."
- "One sand was that used in cement testing with white well rounded smooth grains, passing through a 20-mesh sieve and retained on a 30-mesh sieve. The other was ordinary brown building sand, passing 40-mesh and retained on 60-mesh."
- "The Canadian tar sands are a promising source of oil."
- "From east and south the danger was to be expected. Not from the uninhabited northern desert, not from the desolate sands of the unknown west, would it come."
Etymology
Etymology tree substratebor. Proto-Indo-European *sámdʰos? Proto-Germanic *samdaz Proto-West Germanic *samd Old English sand Middle English sond English sand Inherited from Middle English sond, sand, from Old English sand, from Proto-West Germanic *samd, from Proto-Germanic *samdaz. See also North Frisian sun, Sön, sönj (“sand”), Saterland Frisian Sound (“sand”), West Frisian sân (“sand”), Dutch zand (“sand”), German and Luxembourgish Sand (“sand”), Yiddish זאַמד (zamd, “sand”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish sand (“sand”), Faroese and Icelandic sandur (“sand”), Latin sabulum (“sand, gravel”), Ancient Greek ἄμαθος (ámathos, “sand”), English dialectal samel (“sand bottom”), Old Irish do·essim (“to pour out”), Latin sentina (“bilge water”), Lithuanian sémti (“to scoop”), Ancient Greek ἀμάω (amáō, “to gather”), ἄμη (ámē, “water bucket”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /sænd/
- British English: /sænd/