Yerd

Part of speech: noun, verb

Definitions

1. In Scottish dialect, the ground or earth itself, often meaning the soil in which things grow or are buried
2. A Scots word for the earth or soil, the land beneath one's feet in the countryside
3. Scottish usage for the ground, referring to the loose earth or soil found at the surface of the land

Etymology: "Yerd" is a dialect spelling of "yard," the word for a wooden stick or a measuring rod, and a stick is where the word's history begins. Its ancestor in Old English was "ġeard," which meant an enclosure or a fenced place, and that sense of an enclosed patch of ground survives in the modern word. The Old English form descends from a Germanic root that also gave rise to words for a fence or a court, so a yard was first a space marked off by a barrier rather than a unit of length. The "yerd" spelling belongs to the Middle English period, when the word was written with a "y" for the initial sound that modern "yard" still has. Dialects in parts of England preserved this pronunciation and spelling, which is why the form appears in regional speech and writing as a separate, recognisable variant of the standard word.