Word.ws English Dictionary

arr

/ɑː(ɹ)/US/ɑɹː/

arr is the abbreviation of arrival.

arr is the abbreviation of arrangement.

arr is the abbreviation of arrondissement.

arr is the alternative form of ar.

Interjection

  1. (UK, West-Country, West-Midlands, Yorkshire) Yes.
  2. Used stereotypically in imitation of pirates.
    • Arr, matey! Tis a dangerous life, the sea – full of giant beasts, raging storms and wayward ships bobbing around like steel icebergs.2004, Peter Walsh, How to Organize (Just About) Everything: More than 500 Step-by-Step Instructions for Everything from Organizing Your Closets to Planning a Wedding to Creating a Flawless Filing...
    • He did an imitation of a pirate: "Arr, Arr, Arr, me buckos."2007, Howard [A.] Norman, Devotion, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, →ISBN, page 90

Meaning of arrival

Noun

arrival (countable and uncountable, plural arrivals)

  1. The act of arriving (reaching a certain place).
    • The early arrival of the bride created a stir.
    Synonyms:
    incoming
  2. The fact of reaching a particular point in time.
    • He celebrated the arrival of payday with a shopping spree.
  3. The fact of beginning to occur; the initial phase of something.
    • The arrival of puberty can be especially challenging for transgender youth.
    Synonyms:
    onset
  4. The attainment of an objective, especially as a result of effort.
    • The arrival of the railway made the local tourist industry viable.
    Synonyms:
    advent, introduction
  5. A person who has arrived; a thing that has arrived.
    • There has been a significant growth in illegal arrivals.
    Synonyms:
    arrivant, arriver

Meaning of arrangement

Noun

arrangement (countable and uncountable, plural arrangements)

  1. The act of arranging.
  2. The manner of being arranged.
  3. A collection of things that have been arranged.
  4. A particular way in which items are organized.
    • The single-imaging optic of the mammalian eye offers some distinct visual advantages. Such lenses can take in photons from a wide range of angles, increasing light sensitivity. They also have high spatial resolution, resolving incoming images in minute detail. It’s therefore not surprising that...2013 July-August, Fenella Saunders, “Tiny Lenses See the Big Picture”, in American Scientist
    Synonyms:
    configuration
  5. (in plural, often) Preparations for some undertaking.
  6. An agreement.

See all 7 meanings of arrangement

Verb

arr (third-person singular simple present arrs, present participle arring, simple past and past participle arred)

  1. (rare) To say “arr” like a pirate.
    • How do you know someone's a pirate? Because they arr.
    • This distances the audience from the ripping yam element of the story, and for all the sails and stockades which decorate the stage, there are times when the pace drops and the inevitable oo-arring gets a bit coarse. One small pirate in the audience commented that it got a bit boring when they all...2005, “Treasure Island: A New Adaptation by Grace Barnes”, in Theatre Record: The Chronicle of the British Stage, London: Shuttleworth, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 968
    Synonyms:
    ay, aye, ya, yea, yeah, yep, yes, yarr

Noun capitalized: ARR

ARR (plural ARRs)

  1. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of annual recurring revenue.
    • Every quarter, subscription businesses look at how much their ARR has grown, using the following formula: […]2018, Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert, Subscribed […] , Penguin, →ISBN
  2. (abbreviation, initialism) Initialism of accounting rate of return.

Synonyms of arr

Forms of arr

Noun
alternative formarr.
pluralarrs
pluralARRs
Interjection
alternative formar
Verb
third-person singular presentarrs
present participlearring
past participlearred
pastarred

Origin of arr

By abbreviation.

Possibly from aye. The pirate-imitation form was derived from the West Country dialect after its use by West Country-born actor Robert Newton (1905–1956) in the films Treasure Island (1950) and Blackbeard the Pirate (1952)—and the former’s spin-off media—in which he played, respectively, the fictional pirate Long John Silver and the historical pirate Edward “Blackbeard” Teach (c. 1680 – 1718; also a West Country native).

Words formed from arr

Words that rhyme with arr

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about arr

What does arr mean?
Arr means yes.
What is arr the abbreviation of?
Arr is the abbreviation of arrival.
What part of speech is arr?
Arr can be an interjection, a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce arr?
Arr is pronounced /ɑː(ɹ)/ (UK).

Words near arr in the dictionary

  1. arquebusing
  2. Arquette
  3. Arquettes
  4. arquifoux
  5. arquitecture
  6. arr
  7. arr.
  8. arra
  9. Arraba
  10. arrabbiata
  11. arracach

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: arr (page history and authors); ARR (page history and authors); arrival (page history and authors); arrangement (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-arr.wav.

Cite this entry: “arr.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/arr. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.