Strand Meaning
/stɹænd/Definition, CEFR level B2, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
Listen pronunciation
Definition
nounThe shore or beach of the sea or ocean.
nounThe shore or beach of a lake or river.
Sentence Examples
You can feel the worm as a painful strand under the skin.
She twisted a strand of hair around her finger.
He pulled at a loose strand of wool in his sweater.
CEFR Practice Quiz
She pulled a single ____ of hair from her brush.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
She carefully removed a single ____ of hair from her coat before entering the formal dinner party.
Word Origin & History
* From Middle English strand, strond, from Old English strand (“strand, sea-shore, shore”), from Proto-West Germanic *strand, from Proto-Germanic *strandō (“edge, rim, shore”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)trAnt- (“strand, border, field”), from Proto-Indo-European *sterh₃- (“to broaden, spread out”). Cognate with West Frisian strân, German Strand (“beach”), Danish, Dutch, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish strand (“beach”), Faroese strond (“beach”), Icelandic strönd (“beach”). * (street): Perhaps from the similarity of shape.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"A woman that wandring in our coaſtes hath bought / A plot for price: where ſhe a citie ſet: / To whom we gaue the ſtrond for to manure."
— 1557 July 1, Virgil, “The Second Boke of Virgiles Aenæis”, in Henry [Howard, Earl] of Surrey, transl., edited by William Bolland, Certain Bokes of Virgiles Aenaeis, Turned into English Meter ([Roxburghe Club Publications; I]), London: […] A[braham] J[ohn] Valpy, […], published 1814, →OCLC:
"They rowed about a League; and then ſet me down on a Strand."
— 1726 October 28, [Jonathan Swift], “The Author Sets out as Captain of a Ship. […]”, in Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. […] [Gulliver’s Travels], volume II, London: […] Benj[amin] Motte, […], →OCLC, part IV (A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms), page 159:
"We first note that wh-movement can freely strand prepositions in Icelandic, as in the other Scandinavian languages."
— 1985, Joan Maling, Annie Zaenen, “Preposition-Stranding and Passive”, in Nordic Journal of Linguistics, volume 8, number 2, →DOI, page 199:
"In her dissertation, Goldberg (2005) offers a review of diagnostics used to identify verb-stranding VPE to that point, including tests which link the characteristics of English-style VPE (which strands an auxiliary verb) to verb-stranding VPE in languages like Hebrew and Irish."
— 2021, Emily Manetta, “Verb-second and the verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis debate”, in Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, volume 6, number 1, →DOI, page 6:
"By 1985, the children's strand had been renamed Children's BBC (CBBC by the mid-1990s), which continued to show animation among other programming in a dedicated time slot."
— 2020, Nichola Dobson, Historical Dictionary of Animation and Cartoons, page 45:
Explore More B2 Vocabulary Words
CEFR Practice Quiz
She pulled a single ____ of hair from her brush.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
She carefully removed a single ____ of hair from her coat before entering the formal dinner party.