beach

A1
US /bit͡ʃ/ UK /biːt͡ʃ/
verb noun name Freq #1364

Meanings

  1. 1
    verb

    to land on a beach

    The ship beached near the port.

  2. 2
    noun

    The shore of a body of water, especially when sandy or pebbly.

    Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path[…]. It twisted and turned,[…]and opened out into a big clear space like a lawn. And, back of the lawn, was a big, old-fashioned house, with piazzas stretching in front of it, and all blazing with lights. 'Twas the house I'd seen the roof of from the beach.

  3. 3
    noun

    A horizontal strip of land, usually sandy, adjoining water.

    Up and down, the beach lay empty for miles.

  4. 4
    noun

    A dry, dusty pitch or situation, as though playing on sand.

    I never realised Lincoln was a seaside town. BRIAN LAWS Scunthorpe manager, after losing on a liberally sanded beach of a pitch

  5. 5
    noun

    Euphemistic form of bitch (taboo swear word).

    That beach should be punished!

  6. 6
    verb

    To run aground on a beach.

    When we finally beached, the land was scarcely less wet than the sea.

  7. 7
    verb

    To run (something) aground on a beach.

    It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore.

  8. 8
    name

    A surname.

    “The commissioner does not affect the numbers,’’ Beach said. “They don’t collect the data. They don’t massage the data. They don’t organize it.”

Etymology

From Middle English bache, bæcche (“bank, sandbank”), from Old English beċe (“beck, brook, stream”), from Proto-West Germanic *baki, from Proto-Germanic *bakiz (“brook”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeg- (“flowing water”). Cognates Cognate with Cimbrian pach (“brook, creek, stream”), Dutch beek (“brook, stream”), German Bach (“brook, stream”), German Low German Beek (“brook, stream”), Luxembourgish Baach (“brook, stream”), Mòcheno pòch (“brook, creek, stream”), Vilamovian bāh, baoch (“brook, stream”), Danish bæk (“brook”), Icelandic bekkur (“creek, spring, stream”), Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegi…

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Thesaurus

Synonyms
3 noun · a horizontal strip of land,... backshoresandstrand
Word family
Derived forms backbeachbeach-girlbeach-goerbeach-headbeachballbeachberrybeachboundbeachboybeachcambeachcastbeachcomberbeachcombing

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