Word.ws English Dictionary

bring coals to Newcastle

bring coals to Newcastle is the alternative form of carry coals to Newcastle.

Meaning of carry coals to Newcastle

Verb

carry coals to Newcastle (third-person singular simple present carries coals to Newcastle, present participle carrying coals to Newcastle, simple past and past participle carried coals to Newcastle)

  1. (idiomatic) To do something that is unneeded or redundant.
    • However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did indubitably conduct a...1851, Herman Melville, chapter 81, in Moby-Dick

Forms of bring coals to Newcastle

third-person singular presentbrings coals to Newcastle
present participlebringing coals to Newcastle
past participlebrought coals to Newcastle
pastbrought coals to Newcastle

Questions about bring coals to Newcastle

What is bring coals to Newcastle the alternative form of?
Bring coals to Newcastle is the alternative form of carry coals to Newcastle.

Words near bring coals to Newcastle in the dictionary

  1. bring away
  2. bring back
  3. bring back to life
  4. bring centre
  5. bring centres
  6. bring coals to Newcastle
  7. bring down
  8. bring down a notch
  9. bring down a peg
  10. bring down on
  11. bring down the curtain

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bring coals to Newcastle (page history and authors); carry coals to Newcastle (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.

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