Other forms: lumbering
To lumber is to move slowly and heavily, as though the body were too big for the job in hand. A bear lumbering across the road; a lorry lumbering up a hill in first gear.
It is never light and never quick, and it suits animals, machines and tired people equally: he lumbered to his feet. American English carries a second lumber with no walking in it at all — wood sawn for building, sold at a lumber yard and cut by a lumberjack, which British English calls timber. British English keeps an extra of its own: to lumber someone with something is to leave them stuck with a job nobody wants, and being lumbered with the washing-up is a complaint. The oldest noun sense survives in lumber room, a room full of furniture and boxes nobody uses. As an adjective, lumbering describes anything big and awkward on its feet.
1verblumberTo move slowly and heavily.
“The old dog lumbered over to the door.”
2nounwoodWood that has been sawn ready for building, in American English.
“They picked up more lumber at the yard on Saturday.”
3verbleaveTo leave someone with an unwanted job or responsibility, in informal British English.
“I got lumbered with taking the minutes again.”
4noununusedUnused furniture and junk kept in storage, in older British English.
“The attic was full of lumber nobody wanted.”
lumber is a way of moving.
Nobody has pinned this one down. The earliest lumber on record is not wood but junk — old discarded furniture, the heavy useless stuff too awkward to shift — and the verb may come from that awkwardness. One suggestion links it to Lumbar, an old spelling of Lombard, the Italian pawnbrokers and money-lenders of early England, whose trade was other people's belongings.
Exact origin unknown. The earliest recorded reference for the noun was to heavy, useless objects such as old, discarded furniture. Perhaps from the verb lumber in reference to meaning "awkward to move"; Online Etymological Dictionary [https://www.etymonline.com/word/lumber thinks] this may derive from the same root as lame. Possibly influenced by Lumbar, an obsolete variant of Lombard, the Italian immigrant class known for being pawnbrokers and money-lenders in early England. Compare English lumpish.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, Ways of Moving
First appears in chapter 28 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word