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wheelbarrow

UK/ˈwiːlbæɹəʊ/US/ˈwilbæɹoʊ/
nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,018 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: wheelbarrows

A wheelbarrow is the one-wheeled cart pushed by two handles. Load the wheelbarrow, a wheelbarrow of soil, push the wheelbarrow.

The single wheel is what lets it turn on a plank and go where nothing else can, which is why it has barely changed in about nine hundred years. The load sits over the wheel so the pusher carries only part of the weight. Barrow is the short form. Note that the Chinese wheelbarrow put the wheel in the middle and carried several times the load, which nobody in Europe copied.

Ildar Sagdejev (Specious) · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of wheelbarrow

  1. 1nounwheelbarrowA one-wheeled cart pushed by two handles.B1+

    “He filled the wheelbarrow with fallen leaves and pushed it to the compost heap.”

    synonyms: barrow

wheelbarrow is a small cart.

Also accepted in games: barrow

Where it comes from

The word is wheel plus barrow, and barrow comes from Old English bearwe, from beran, to carry — the same root as bear and bier. A barrow is a carrying frame and the wheel was added to it.

  1. Middle English

    whelbarwe

  2. English, today

    wheelbarrow

From Middle English whelbarwe. From Middle English whelbarwe; equivalent to wheel + barrow.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Around the House, Farm & Countryside

Practise this word

wheelbarrow in the wild

  • Traditional Chinese wheelbarrows, however, had a central wheel supporting the whole load.

    Wheelbarrow

  • Use of wheelbarrows is common in the construction industry and in gardening.

    Wheelbarrow

  • Concrete finishers place the concrete either directly from the concrete wagon chute, concrete pump, concrete skip or wheelbarrow.

    Concrete finisher

  • The party uses a wheelbarrow as the party's symbol which stands for "worth, respect, and dignity of work in pursuit of an unbiased society".

    United Democratic Alliance (Kenya)

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.