Other forms: beaches, beached, beaching
A beach is the sandy or pebbly edge of the sea. On the beach, a sandy beach, beach holiday.
British beaches are as often shingle as sand, which surprises visitors. Beach is the strip itself; coast is the larger line of the land; shore is the edge of any water including lakes. To beach a boat is to run it deliberately up onto the sand, and a beached whale is one stranded there. Note beachcomber; beach hut; and the beach as a metaphor for doing nothing at all.
1nounbeachThe sandy or pebbly edge of the sea.
“We spent the afternoon lying on the beach and swimming in the sea.”
2verbboatTo run a boat up onto the sand.
“The fishermen beached their boat and carried the nets up the sand.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
beach is a shore.
The word first meant shingle or loose stones, probably from an Old English word for a stream, and only later the shore itself. That is why a pebble beach is arguably the original one.
Old English
bæċ
Middle English
bache
English, today
beach
From Middle English bache, from Old English bæċ. 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”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA