Other forms: fencing, fences, fenced
A fence is the wooden barrier round a garden. Posts, panels, and a gate somewhere along it.
It marks a boundary rather than blocking a view, which is what separates it from a wall, and the material can be wire, wood or iron. Horse racing uses the word for the jumps. It gives English one of its most useful images for indecision, since sitting on the fence means refusing to take either side. There is a criminal sense too, since a fence is somebody who buys and sells stolen goods.
1nounfenceA barrier of wood or wire marking a boundary.~92%
“The fence blew down in the storm.”
2verbencloseTo enclose an area with a fence.~8%
“They fenced off the far end of the field.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense (5 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
A fence is a defence with the front cut off. Middle English shortened defens, the act of defending, and by the middle of the fifteenth century the word had settled onto the enclosure itself.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʷʰen-
Old French
defens
Middle English
fence
English, today
fence
Built from
From Middle English fence, fens, short for defence, defens (“the act of defending”), from Old French defens, defense (see defence). The sense "enclosure" arises in the mid 15th century. Also from the 15th century is use as a verb in the sense "to enclose with a fence". The generalized sense "to defend, screen, protect" arises ca. 1500. The sense "to fight with swords (rapiers)" is from the 1590s (Shakespeare).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA