Halyards

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A rope or cable used for raising and lowering sails on a ship or boat
2. A mechanism employed in sailing vessels to control the position of sails through rigging
3. A crucial component of nautical equipment that facilitates adjustments to the height of various sail types for optimal performance

Etymology: The most surprising part of this word is the "yard" in it, which has nothing to do with measurement or sailing spars. The word began in Middle English as "halier", formed from "halen", meaning "to haul", plus the agent suffix "-ier", so it originally named something like a hauling-rope or the thing that does the hauling. Over time speakers reinterpreted the final syllable as the familiar word "yard", the long spar on which a square sail hangs, and the spelling shifted to match. The same kind of reshaping happened to "lanyard", a word that has nothing to do with yards either. Both terms show how English speakers, faced with an unfamiliar ending, tend to swap in a common word they already know, even when the result makes little sense for the object named.

Synonyms: rope, line