Word.ws English Dictionary

carries coals to Newcastle

carries coals to Newcastle is the third-person singular simple present indicative 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

Questions about carries coals to Newcastle

What is carries coals to Newcastle the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Carries coals to Newcastle is the third-person singular simple present indicative of carry coals to Newcastle.

Words near carries coals to Newcastle in the dictionary

  1. carries
  2. carries a torch
  3. carries a tune
  4. carries all before one
  5. carries away
  6. carries coals to Newcastle
  7. carries conviction
  8. carries corn
  9. carries everything before one
  10. carries forward
  11. carries off

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: carries 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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