How to use tarpaulin in a sentence
10 example sentences · noun, verb
Tarpaulin means a heavy, waterproof sheet of material, often cloth or plastic sheet, used as a cover or blanket (often as weatherproofing, or to keep loose cargo from blowing off a lorry). Example: “Throw a tarpaulin over that woodpile before it gets wet.”
Examples of tarpaulin by meaning
nounA heavy, waterproof sheet of material, often cloth or plastic sheet, used as a cover or blanket (often as...
- Throw a tarpaulin over that woodpile before it gets wet.
- There were sailors asleep in the fantastic fashion of the British tarpaulin — snoring heavily as they lay on the bare deck, despite the din about them.1946, C. S. Forester, chapter 4, in Lord Hornblower, Boston: Little, Brown, and Co.
verbTo cover with a tarpaulin.
- So we tarpaulined it according to his instructions, and there it lies.1929, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, When the World Screamed
More sentences with tarpaulin
- Water dripped onto the tarpaulin with a drummy sound.From the entry drummy
- So we slept, coorieing down into the blankets under the tarpaulin.2013 June 24, Betsy Whyte, The Yellow on the Broom: The Early Days of a Traveller Woman, Birlinn, →ISBN. From the entry coorie
- They were all two-horse wagons with sacks piled high above their sides and covered with tarpaulins.1989, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willetts, August 1914, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, →ISBN, page 95. From the entry carter
- By the fire the billies were boiling, the tucker of both camps spread out on tarpaulins.1937, Ion L. Idriess, Over the Range, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, published 1947, page 10. From the entry billy
- We needed the sail for the boat, and the tarpaulin had begun to leak.1904, Jack London, chapter 30, in The Sea-Wolf (Macmillan’s Standard Library), New York, N.Y.: Grosset & Dunlap, →OCLC. From the entry tundra
- "Take my tarpaulin coat for the journey.1928, Eden Phillpotts, Children of Men, page 389. From the entry niddick
- The perishable goods were placed in the large warehouses but the unperishable were covered with tarpaulin and left where unloaded.1912, Charles E Young, Dangers of the Trail in 1865. From the entry unperishable
Meaning of tarpaulin
- noun A heavy, waterproof sheet of material, often cloth or plastic sheet, used as a cover or blanket (often as weatherproofing, or to keep loose cargo from blowing off a lorry).
- noun Canvas waterproofed with tar, used as a cover.
- noun A hat made of, or covered with, painted or tarred cloth, worn by sailors and others.
Questions about tarpaulin in a sentence
- How do you use tarpaulin in a sentence?
- Tarpaulin is used as a noun and verb. For example: “Throw a tarpaulin over that woodpile before it gets wet.”
- What is a short sentence with tarpaulin?
- “"Take my tarpaulin coat for the journey.”
- What does tarpaulin mean?
- Tarpaulin means a heavy, waterproof sheet of material, often cloth or plastic sheet, used as a cover or blanket (often as weatherproofing, or to keep loose cargo from blowing off a lorry).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tarpaulin (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this page: “How to use tarpaulin in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/tarpaulin. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.