Other forms: wharves, wharfs
A wharf is a platform along the water where ships are worked. Tie up at the wharf, the old wharf, unload at the wharf.
It runs parallel to the shore, where a pier sticks out and a quay is usually built solid — the words overlap and the distinctions are real. Containerisation emptied the old finger wharves of every port in a decade. The plural is wharves or wharfs.
1nounwharfA platform along the water where ships are worked.
“Workers unloaded crates of fruit onto the wharf.”
wharf is a landing place.
Old English hwearf means an embankment or heap, related to hweorfan, to turn. The German Werft is a relative.
Middle English
wharf
English, today
wharf
From Middle English wharf. From Middle English wharf, from Old English hwearf (“heap, embankment, wharf”); related to Old English hweorfan (“to turn”), Old Saxon hwerf (whence German Werft and Warft), Dutch werf, Old High German hwarb (“a turn”), hwerban (“to turn”), Old Norse hvarf (“circle”), and Ancient Greek καρπός (“wrist”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA