Wheelbarrow or Wheelbarrel?
Wheelbarrow or
Wheelbarrel? It's Wheelbarrow you fuck sticks.I overheard a landscaper yesterday talking to his colleagues about a "
wheelbarrel". This is an occasional mistake people make; indeed when I worked at the Canadian Oxford Dictionary department we had a letter from someone who said she had a bet with her boyfriend about it and a pizza was riding on the outcome!It's not surprising that people change "
barrow" into "barrel" because "barrow", originally something like a stretcher on legs with shafts by which it could be lifted, is not a common word anymore. This phenomenon of exchanging an unfamiliar word to a similar sounding familiar one has been quite common over the course of the history of the language. For instance, as we saw earlier, the Old English word "
goom" became "groom".Another phenomenon favouring the understanding of "
Barrow" as "barrel" is that terminal l's are often swallowed up in speech, or in some varieties of the language turned into a vowel, so some people will say "barrel" as if it were "barrew"."Barrel" came into English from French; its ultimate origin is unknown. "Barrow", on the other hand, like most garden equipment terms, likely goes back to Anglo-Saxon, related to the word "bear" (carry).