Other forms: yards
A yard is a unit of length equal to three feet, or a little under a metre. Roughly one long stride.
It survives in Britain for cloth, cricket pitches and road signs, and in America for almost everything, most famously in the hundred-yard dash and the ten yards of an American football down. The completely separate sense is a piece of enclosed ground, and there British and American English part company: a British yard is paved and a garden is grassed, while an American yard is the grass itself. Shipyards, farmyards and railway yards use the same word.
1nounyardA unit of length of three feet.~37%
“He bought two yards of curtain fabric.”
2nounenclosedAn enclosed area of ground beside a building.~63%
“The children were playing in the yard.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 19 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Middle English
yerd
English, today
yard
From Middle English yerd. From Middle English yerd, yard, ȝerd, ȝeard, from Old English ġeard (“yard, garden, fence, enclosure”), from Proto-West Germanic gard, from Proto-Germanic gardaz (“enclosure, yard”), from Proto-Indo-European gʰórdʰos, from Proto-Indo-European gʰerdʰ- (“to enclose”). See also frr guard, Guart (“garden, yard”), Dutch gaard, gaarde (“garden, yard”), German Garten (“garden, yard”), Danish -, Swedish gård (“farm, estate, land; court, yard”), Faroese -, Icelandic garður (“garden; fence”), nrn gart (“farm”), Norwegian Bokmål -, Norwegian Nynorsk gard, gård (“farm; townhouse”), Gothic 𐌲𐌰𐍂𐌳𐍃 (“court, yard; house”), Lithuanian gardas (“pen, enclosure”), Russian го́род (“town”), Serbo-Croatian grad (“town”), Slovene grad (“castle”), Albanian gardh (“fence”), Romanian gard (“fence”), ae 𐬔𐬆𐬭𐬆𐬛𐬵𐬀 (“dev's cave”), Sanskrit गृह (“house, habitation, home, dwelling”)), Medieval Latin gardinus, jardinus (“garden, yard”). a doublet of garden and garth and gord.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA