Other forms: wards, warding, warded
A ward is a large hospital room holding several beds, or a whole hospital department made of such rooms. The children ward, the maternity ward, a nurse doing her round past six curtained beds.
A ward is also a district of a town or city used for elections: you vote for a councillor in your ward, and results come in ward by ward. In law, a ward is a child under someone legal protection — a ward of court, or a guardian and his ward. As a verb it survives mainly in ward off, to keep something away, whether a blow, a cold or bad luck. Do not mix it up with warden, the person in charge of a place. And the -ward on the end of homeward and backward is a different piece of English altogether.
1nounwardA room or department in a hospital with beds for patients.~13%
“She was moved from intensive care to a general ward.”
2noundistrictA district of a town or city used for local elections and government.~50%
“The party lost every ward in the city except one.”
3nounchildA child or young person under the legal care of a guardian or a court.~12%
“He became a ward of the court at the age of eleven.”
4verbkeepTo keep something harmful away — almost always as ward off.~25%
“She drank hot lemon all week to ward off a cold.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
ward is a part of a hospital.
Old English weard meant a watchman, a guard, a protector — even a lord or a king — from Proto-Germanic *warduz and the Indo-European root *wer-, to heed or defend. Every modern use still has someone being watched over: the patients in a hospital ward, the child in a guardian care, the blow you ward off.
Proto-Indo-European
*wer- — to heed, defend
Proto-Germanic
*warduz — guard, keeper
Old English
weard — keeper, watchman, guard, guardian, protector; lord, king; possessor
Middle English
warde
English, today
ward
From Middle English warde, from Old English weard (“keeper, watchman, guard, guardian, protector; lord, king; possessor”), from Proto-Germanic warduz (“guard, keeper”), from Proto-Indo-European wer- (“to heed, defend”). Cognate with Dutch waard, German Wart.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA