ditch

C2+ Topic:General Vocabulary

US /dɪtʃ/ UK /dɪtʃ/ See IPA manual

Minimal pairs

Sounds like dish /tʃ/ vs /ʃ/ Sounds like diss /tʃ/ vs /s/

Meanings

1

noun
a narrow channel dug to hold or carry water; to discard

Rainwater drained quickly into the ditch beside the road.

Thesaurus

Synonyms

1 noun · a narrow channel dug to... trench channel gully moat drain furrow

Word family

Forms ditcher

Derived forms ditcherditching

Related forms dike dyke

Appears in

Phrases (1)

See all

irrigation ditch
a channel dug to carry water to agricultural land

Noun + noun

Simplified etymology

Ditch is an Old English variant within the same word family as dyke and the later verb dig. Its history reflects the excavated sense of the family: something dug out of the ground.

Etymology

From Old English dīc ('ditch, dike, moat'), from Proto-Germanic *dīkaz; a doublet of dike, both originally referring to the trench and the bank thrown up from it.

dīc Old English *dīkaz Proto-Germanic

View etymology graph ->

Topics

General Vocabulary

External links

# ditch

**Type:** Word
**Level:** C2+
**Part of speech:** noun
**IPA (US):** /dɪtʃ/
**IPA (UK):** /dɪtʃ/

## Meanings
1. a narrow channel dug to hold or carry water; to discard

## Examples
- Rainwater drained quickly into the ditch beside the road.

## Synonyms
- trench
- channel
- gully
- moat
- drain
- furrow

## Derived Forms
- ditcher
- ditching

## Related Forms
- dike
- dyke

## Roots and Affixes
- Root: dīc
- Root: *dīkaz

## Etymology
From Old English dīc ('ditch, dike, moat'), from Proto-Germanic *dīkaz; a doublet of dike, both originally referring to the trench and the bank thrown up from it.

## AI Etymology
Ditch is from Old English dīc ('ditch, dike, moat'), from Proto-Germanic *dīkaz; a doublet of dike, both originally referring to the trench and the bank thrown up from it. The ancestry passes through Old English dīc and Proto-Germanic *dīkaz. In present use as noun and verb, it means "a narrow channel dug to hold or carry water; to discard", keeping the historical formation close to the word's ordinary semantic work. Related words include dike and dyke; derived forms include ditcher and ditching. The surrounding word family keeps the same base visible in ditcher, ditching, dike, and dyke, showing how the headword belongs to a larger cluster rather than standing alone.

## Topics
- General Vocabulary

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