Word.ws English Dictionary

carrying coals to Newcastle

carrying coals to Newcastle is the present participle and gerund 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 carrying coals to Newcastle

What is carrying coals to Newcastle the present participle and gerund of?
Carrying coals to Newcastle is the present participle and gerund of carry coals to Newcastle.

Words near carrying coals to Newcastle in the dictionary

  1. carrying away
  2. carrying basket
  3. carrying baskets
  4. carrying capacities
  5. carrying capacity
  6. carrying coals to Newcastle
  7. carrying conviction
  8. carrying corn
  9. carrying everything before one
  10. carrying forward
  11. carrying off

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: carrying 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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