Word.ws English Dictionary

halyard

/ˈhæljə(ɹ)d/

halyard noun: a rope used to raise or lower a sail, flag, spar or yard.

Noun

halyard (plural halyards)

  1. A rope used to raise or lower a sail, flag, spar or yard.
    • At last I got my knife and cut the halyards. The peak dropped instantly, a great belly of loose canvas floated broad upon the water […]1881–1882, Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, London; Paris: Cassell & Company, published 14 November 1883, →OCLC
    • […]broad-shouldered men with hard red-beaked faces and huge hands coarsened by generations of straining on heavy oars and halyards,—men who feared only God and the sea-spirits of their strange mythology and were a law unto themselves, adventurers and bigots.1922, John Dos Passos, “A Novelist of Revolution”, in Rosinante to the Road Again, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, →OCLC
  2. A rope used to extend a ladder.

halyard meaning in Tamil

halyard in Tamil

கலியாட்டு

Examples of halyard in a sentence

  • Have the goodness to secure the falls of the mizzen halyards.
  • By easing the halyard, the luff of the sail was made to sag to leeward.
  • “Run the spin halyard to the cabin-top winch and pass me the free end!”

All 10 example sentences with halyard

Forms of halyard

pluralhalyards
alternative formhalliard

Origin of halyard

Inherited from Middle English halier, from halen (“to haul”) + -iere (“-er”), with misconstrual of -ier as yard. Compare lanyard.

Words formed from halyard

Questions about halyard

What does halyard mean?
Halyard means a rope used to raise or lower a sail, flag, spar or yard.
What is halyard in Tamil?
Halyard in Tamil is கலியாட்டு. See Halyard meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is halyard?
Halyard is a noun.
How do you pronounce halyard?
Halyard is pronounced /ˈhæljə(ɹ)d/.
What is the plural of halyard?
The plural of halyard is halyards.

Words near halyard in the dictionary

  1. halwahs
  2. Halwai
  3. halwas
  4. Halwill
  5. Halwill Junction
  6. halyard
  7. halyards
  8. Halych
  9. Halychyna
  10. halycon
  11. Halyikwamai

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: halyard (page history and authors); halyard (Tamil Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-halyard.wav.

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