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berth

Pronunciation: /bɜːθ/

The English word “berth” has 19 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A place for a vessel to lie at anchor or to moor.
  2. A room in a vessel in which the officers or company mess (“eat together”) and reside; also, a room or other place in a vessel for storage.
  3. A place on a vessel to sleep, especially a bed on the side of a cabin.
  4. A job or position on a vessel.
  5. An assigned place for a person in (chiefly historical) a horse-drawn coach or other means of transportation, or (military) in a barracks.
  6. A bunk or other bed for sleeping on in a caravan, a train, etc.
  7. A place for a vehicle on land to park.
  8. An appointment, job, or position, especially one regarded as comfortable or good.
  9. Chiefly in wide berth: a sufficient space for manoeuvring or safety.
  10. A proper place for a thing.
  11. A position or seed in a tournament bracket.
  12. A position on a field of play.

verb

  1. To bring (a ship or other vessel) into a berth (noun etymology 1, noun sense 1.1); also, to provide a berth for (a vessel).
  2. To use a device to bring (a spacecraft) into its berth or dock.
  3. To assign (someone) a berth (noun etymology 1, noun sense 1.3 or etymology 1, noun sense 2.2) or place to sleep on a vessel, a train, etc.
  4. To provide (someone) with a berth (noun etymology 1, noun sense 3.1) or appointment, job, or position.
  5. Of a vessel: to move into a berth.
  6. Of a person: to occupy a berth.
  7. Chiefly in shipbuilding: to construct (a ship or part of it) using wooden boards or planks; to board, to plank.

Etymology

The noun is derived from Late Middle English birth (“(nautical) bearing away or off, clearance, berth”). Further etymology uncertain, but probably from beren (“to carry (away), bear”) + -th (suffix denoting a condition, quality, state of being, etc., forming nouns); if so, the English word is analysable as bear + -th (suffix forming nouns from verbs), and is a piecewise doublet of birth. The verb…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.