Word.ws English Dictionary

rail

/ɹeɪ(ə)l/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

South Asia/reɪl/

rail noun: a horizontal bar extending between supports and used for support or as a barrier; a railing.

rail: a horizontal bar extending between supports and used for support or as a barrier; a railing
Image: KrisMaes, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

rail (plural rails)

  1. A horizontal bar extending between supports and used for support or as a barrier; a railing.
    • Old Applegate, in the stern, just set and looked at me, and Lord James, amidship, waved both arms and kept hollering for help. I took a couple of everlasting big strokes and managed to grab hold of the skiff's rail, close to the stern.1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC
  2. The metal bar forming part of the track for a railroad.
    • A "moving platform" scheme[…]is more technologically ambitious than maglev trains even though it relies on conventional rails. Local trains would use side-by-side rails to roll alongside intercity trains and allow passengers to switch trains by stepping through docking bays.2013 June 1, “Ideas coming down the track”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, page 13 (Technology Quarterly)
  3. A railroad; a railway, as a means of transportation.
    • We travelled to the seaside by rail.
    • a small Scottish village not accessible by rail
  4. A conductor maintained at a fixed electrical potential relative to ground, to which other circuit components are connected.
    • ISA devices draw power from the +5 V, −5 V, +12 V, and −12 V rails of the power supply unit.
    • There has been another, fairly gradual change in the ATX specification: Initially a lot of power was supplied on the 5V and 3.3V rails, but over time more and more power shifted to 12V because it's more efficient. Modern (ATX12V 2.x) PSUs supply most of their power on the 12V rail and not a lot on...2019 December 5, Michal Necasek, “Power Trouble”, in OS/2 Museum, archived from the original on 25 Sep 2022
  5. A horizontal piece of wood that serves to separate sections of a door or window.
  6. One of the lengthwise edges of a surfboard.
    • Rails alone can only ever have a marginal effect on a board's general turning ability.c. 2000, Nick Carroll, surfline.com http://www.surfline.com/community/whoknows/10_21_rails.cfm
  7. (Internet) A vertical section on one side of a web page.
    • We're experimenting with ads in the right-hand rail.
  8. A large line (portion or serving of a powdery illegal drug).
    • Do a couple rails and chase your own tail2013, Jason Isbell, Super 8
  9. Each of two vertical side bars supporting the rungs of a ladder.
    Synonyms:
    stile, stringer
  10. The raised edge of the game board.

Verb (1)

rail (third-person singular simple present rails, present participle railing, simple past and past participle railed)

  1. (intransitive) To travel by railway.
    • Mottram of the Indian Survey had ridden thirty and railed one hundred miles from his lonely post in the desert […]1890, Rudyard Kipling, At the End of the Passage
  2. (transitive) To place on a track.
  3. (transitive) To enclose with rails or a railing.
    • They ought to rail off the playground.
    • It ought to be fenced in and railed.1726, John Ayliffe, Parergon Juris Canonici Anglicani: Or, A Commentary, by Way of Supplement to the Canons and Constitutions of the Church of England. […], London: […] D. Leach, and sold by John...
  4. (transitive) To range in a line.
    • They were brought to London all railed in ropes, like a team of horses in a cart.1622, Francis, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban [i.e. Francis Bacon], The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh, […], London: […] W[illiam] Stansby for Matthew Lownes, and William Barret...
  5. (slang, transitive, vulgar) To sexually penetrate in a rough manner.
  6. (slang, transitive) To snort a line of powdered drugs.
    • All I can think about is being seventeen days sober and desperate to rail a line of blow after last night's group outing to see Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring (at my request), which, in hindsight, was a fucking dumb thing for a rehab to approve of.2025 May 27, Tommy Dorfman, “Finding God”, in Maybe This Will Save Me: A Memoir of Art, Addiction and Transformation, Harlequin, →ISBN

Noun (2)

rail (plural rails)

  1. Any of several birds in the family Rallidae.

Verb (2)

rail (third-person singular simple present rails, present participle railing, simple past and past participle railed)

  1. To complain violently (against, about).
    • Till thou canst raile the seale from off my bond
      Thou but offend'st thy Lungs to speake so loud:
      Repaire thy wit good youth, or it will fall
      To endlesse ruine. I stand heere for Law.c. 1596–1598 (date written), W[illiam] Shakespeare, The Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. […] (First Quarto), [London]: […] J[ames] Roberts [for Thomas Heyes], published 1600, →OCLC...
    • He always said: “Let them rail on; he laughs best who laughs last.”1882, Mark Twain, “The Stolen White Elephant”

Noun (3)

rail (plural rails)

  1. (obsolete) An item of clothing; a cloak or other garment; a dress.
  2. (obsolete) Specifically, a woman's headscarf or neckerchief.
    • A course hempen raile about her shoulders.1592, Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless

Verb (3)

rail (third-person singular simple present rails, present participle railing, simple past and past participle railed)

  1. (obsolete) To gush; to flow.
    • his breste and his brayle was bloodé – and hit rayled all over the see.1470–1485 (date produced), Thomas Malory, “Capitulum iv”, in [Le Morte Darthur], book V, [London: […] by William Caxton], published 31 July 1485, →OCLC; republished as H[einrich] Oskar Sommer...
    • So furiously each other did assayle, / As if their soules they would attonce haue rent / Out of their brests, that streames of bloud did rayle / Adowne, as if their springes of life were spent[…].1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book IV, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
  2. (obsolete) To blow.

rail meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Bengali

rail in Hindi

a rail
रेल rel
rail, track
पटरी paṭrī

rail in Tamil

small bird in the family Rallidae
காணாங்கோழி kāṇāṅkōḻi

rail in Urdu

پٹری, سخت برا بھلا کہنا, توہین کرنا, گاڑی سے بھیجنا, پٹری لگانا

rail in Bengali

rail
রেল rel
More languagesFewer languages
rail in Telugu
రైలు railu
rail in Malayalam
ശകാരിക്കുക, ദുഷിക്കുക, ഭള്ളുപറയുക, ഭർത്സിക്കുക
rail in Kannada
ಕಂಬಿ, ಅಡ್ಡಕಂಬಿ, ಇಳಿಜಾರುಗಂಬಿ, ರೈಲು ಕಂಬಿ
rail in Punjabi
ਰੇਲ rel
rail in Gujarati
રેલ
rail in Tagalog
tikling
rail in Persian
ریل reyl, یلوه yalve
rail in Thai
ราง raang

Examples of rail in a sentence

  • Chief Joyi railed against the white man, whom he believed had deliberately sundered the Xhosa tribe, dividing brother from brother.1994, Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, London: Abacus, published 2010, page 27:
  • The Queen may be celebrating her jubilee but the Queen's English Society, which has railed against the misuse and deterioration of the English language, is to fold.2012 June 4, Lewis Smith, “Queen’s English Society says enuf is enough, innit?: Society formed 40 years ago to protect language against...

All 40 example sentences with rail

Synonyms of rail

All synonyms of rail

Forms of rail

Noun
pluralrails
alternative formrayle
Verb
third-person singular presentrails
present participlerailing
past participlerailed
pastrailed

Past tense of rail: railed

Plural of rail: rails

Origin of rail

From Middle English rail, rayl, *reȝel, *reȝol (found in reȝolsticke (“a ruler”)), partly from Old English regol (“a ruler, straight bar”) and partly from Old French reille; both from Latin regula (“rule, bar”), from regō (“to rule, to guide, to govern”); see regular. Doublet of regal, regula, rigol, and rule.

From French râle, rale, from Middle French raalle, from Old French rasle. Compare Medieval Latin rallus. Named from its harsh cry, Vulgar Latin *rasculum, from Latin rādere (“to scrape”).

From Middle French railler.

Words formed from rail

Phrases with rail

121 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with rail

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about rail

What does rail mean?
Rail means a horizontal bar extending between supports and used for support or as a barrier; a railing.
What is rail in Hindi?
Rail in Hindi is रेल (rel), पटरी (paṭrī). See Rail meaning in Hindi.
How do you use rail in a sentence?
Chief Joyi railed against the white man, whom he believed had deliberately sundered the Xhosa tribe, dividing brother from brother.
What part of speech is rail?
Rail can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce rail?
Rail is pronounced /ɹeɪ(ə)l/.
What is the plural of rail?
The plural of rail is rails.

Words near rail in the dictionary

  1. Raikes
  2. Raikeses
  3. raiking
  4. Raikkonen
  5. raiks
  6. rail
  7. rail anchor
  8. rail anchors
  9. rail and stile
  10. rail brake
  11. rail brakes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rail (page history and authors); पटरी (Hindi) (page history and authors); rail (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); রেল (Bengali) (page history and authors); రైలు (Telugu) (page history and authors); rail (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); rail (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors); ਰੇਲ (Punjabi) (page history and authors); rail (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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: en-us-rail.ogg.

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