Other forms: moors, moored, mooring
To moor is to tie a vessel up so that it cannot drift. Moor the boat, moored alongside, a mooring buoy.
A mooring is both the act and the place, and mooring fees are what makes owning a boat expensive. There is a separate and unrelated noun moor meaning open upland covered in heather — the Yorkshire moors, moorland — which is a major British landscape type and a globally rare habitat. Note moorhen, which lives on water rather than on moors; and that the two words have nothing to do with each other.
1verbmoorTo tie a vessel up so it cannot drift.
“We moored the boat by the bridge and walked into the village.”
2nounopenOpen upland covered in heather.
“The wind howled across the lonely moor.”
moor is a securing, or open upland.
The landscape word is Old English mor, a marsh or waste. The nautical verb is probably from Middle Dutch and about making fast. They are separate words that happened to arrive at the same spelling.
Proto-Indo-European
*móri
Proto-Germanic
*mōraz
Proto-West Germanic
*mōr
Old English
mōr
Middle English
mor
English, today
moor
From Middle English mor, from Old English mōr, from Proto-West Germanic mōr, from Proto-Germanic mōraz, from Proto-Indo-European móri. Cognates include Welsh môr, Old Irish muir (from Proto-Celtic mori); Scots muir, Dutch moer, Old Saxon mōr, Old Saxon mūr, German Moor and perhaps also Gothic 𐌼𐌰𐍂𐌴𐌹. See mere.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA