sand

UK/sænd/US/sænd/

nounB13 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,502 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: sands, sanding, sanded

Sand is what a beach is made of: grains of worn-down rock fine enough to pour through your fingers. It gets into your shoes, into the sandwiches, and into the bottom of the bag two months after the holiday.

Sand covers deserts and riverbeds as well as beaches, and builders buy it by the tonne to mix into concrete. It is a verb too — you sand a piece of wood, rubbing it with sandpaper until it is smooth enough to paint — and a colour, the pale warm yellow-brown of a sand jacket. Treat it as uncountable: plenty of sand, a grain of sand, never two sands. The plural survives only in old phrases like the sands of time, and in the sands for a stretch of beach.

Definitions of sand

1nounsandThe loose grains of worn rock that cover beaches, deserts and riverbeds.B1~96%
“The sand was too hot to walk on by midday.”
2verbrubTo rub a surface smooth with sandpaper.B1~2%
“Sand the door down before you paint it.”
3adjectivecolourOf a pale warm yellow-brown colour.B2~2%
“He wore a sand jacket and dark boots.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 171 sentences found in the wild and placed 139 of them on a sense (32 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Phrases it lives in

bury your head in the sand — refuse to face a problem that is plainly there
built on sand — resting on nothing solid, and certain to give way
the sands of time — time running out, in the way an hourglass shows it

Also practised as

adjectiveA pale warm yellow-brown.

Where it comes from

Sand has been sand for as long as there has been English — Old English sand, and beside it Dutch zand, German Sand, Swedish sand, Icelandic sandur. Further out the family scatters into Latin sabulum, sand and gravel, and into words for handling the stuff: Lithuanian sémti, to scoop, and a Greek word for a water bucket.

Middle English
sond
English, today
sand

From Middle English sond. Middle English sond, sand, from Old English sand, from Proto-West Germanic samd, from Proto-Germanic samdaz. See also frr sun, Sön, sönj (“sand”), stq Sound (“sand”), West Frisian sân (“sand”), Dutch zand (“sand”), German and lb Sand (“sand”), Yiddish זאַמד (“sand”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish sand (“sand”), Faroese and Icelandic sandur (“sand”), Latin sabulum (“sand, gravel”), Ancient Greek ἄμαθος (“sand”), English - dialectal samel (“sand bottom”), Old Irish do·essim (“to pour out”), Latin sentina (“bilge water”), Lithuanian sémti (“to scoop”), Ancient Greek ἀμάω (“to gather”), ἄμη (“water bucket”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Nature & Weather, A Man Called Ove, Materials & Substances

First appears in chapter 7 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

sand in the wild

The first sand cat known to scientists was discovered in the Algerian Sahara and described in 1858.
Sand cat
The sand cat usually rests in underground dens during the day and hunts at night.
Sand cat
New Zealand sandflies are in the genus of sand fly Austrosimulium, a type of black fly.
Sandfly
Wind-blown sand grains striking any solid object in their path can abrade the surface.
Desert
Rocks are smoothed down, and the wind sorts sand into uniform deposits.
Desert

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

Definitions of sand

1nounsandThe loose grains of worn rock that cover beaches, deserts and riverbeds.B1~96%

“The sand was too hot to walk on by midday.”

2verbrubTo rub a surface smooth with sandpaper.B1~2%

“Sand the door down before you paint it.”

3adjectivecolourOf a pale warm yellow-brown colour.B2~2%

“He wore a sand jacket and dark boots.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 171 sentences found in the wild and placed 139 of them on a sense (32 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.