ward

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   A section of a hospital for patients who need similar care.

   They moved her to the children's ward.

2. 2
   noun

   A child or young person who is under the legal protection of a guardian or court.

   After his parents died, he became a ward of the state.

3. 3
   verb

   To keep something harmful away, usually used with 'off'.

   She drank hot tea to ward off the cold.

Multiword verbs with ward

• ward off Phrasal verb B1

  to prevent something harmful or unwanted from reaching or affecting someone

Appears in

Simplified etymology

Ward comes from Old English weard, meaning “watchman” or “guard,” and shares an old Germanic root with guard. Its sense of a child under a guardian’s protection arose in late Middle English, while hospital ward dates from the mid-18th century and reflects the idea of patients being watched over.

From Middle English ward, warde, from Old English weard (“watching, ward, protection, guardianship; advance post; waiting for, lurking, ambuscade”), from Proto-West Germanic *wardu, from Proto-Germanic *wardō (“protection, attention, keeping”), an extension of the stem *wara- (“attentive”) (English wary, beware), from Proto-Indo-European *wer- (“to cover”). Cognate with German Warte (“watchtower”), warten (“wait for”); English guard is a parallel form which came via Old French.

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External links

• Google Images
• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary