barrel
Pluralbarrels
Verbbarrels
Pluralbarrels
Formsbarrels
- 1A cylindrical wooden vessel with bulging sides, made of staves bound by hoops and closed with flat ends; sometimes also a similar metal drum.
We rolled the heavy barrel of cider into the cellar.
The brewery stacks empty barrels along the back wall.
Note
The everyday cask, and the root of every other meaning here. The word came through Middle English barel from Anglo-Norman and Old French baril, and its origin is uncertain. A link to Old French barre, 'bar, bolt', works for the sound but not for the meaning. Barrel and cask are near-synonyms, but barrel is the word in phrases like cracker barrel and in the oil trade, where barrels of crude are abbreviated bbl.
- 2The metallic tube of a gun or firearm through which a projectile is discharged.
The rifle's barrel had been rifled to spin the bullet for accuracy.
Soldiers swabbed the cannon barrels between rounds.
- 3A measured quantity equal to the contents of one full cask, the exact volume or weight varying by local law and custom.
Oil prices rose sharply, adding ten dollars to every barrel.
The brewery shipped forty barrels to the festival.
Note
As a measure, the barrel never had one size; it depended on what filled it. The statutes of Henry VIII quoted in James Edwin Thorold Rogers's A History of Agriculture and Prices in England (1882) set a barrel of beer at 36 gallons but a barrel of ale at 32, and a wine barrel smaller again. When the figure matters, name the commodity and the rules that apply.
- 4To move rapidly and often without control, rushing headlong in one direction.
She barreled into the room without knocking.
Cars barrel along the freeway during rush hour.
Similarhurtle, charge, race, tear, rush
Note
The verb of headlong motion is usually followed by a direction: barreling down the mountain, around the corner, into a room. It suggests mass and momentum that are hard to stop, which fits avalanches and pushy visitors alike. American spelling keeps one l (barreling, barreled); British spelling doubles it (barrelling, barrelled).
- 5A cask of a defined capacity, holding one-eighth of the volume contained by a tun.
Each barrel held exactly one-eighth of a tun in the old measure.
The merchant counted his barrels before loading the ship.
Similarcask
Note
Casks came as a family of sizes, and the barrel sat in the middle of it. Keith Dunstan's The Amber Nectar (1987) lists the ladder: firkin, nine gallons; kilderkin, eighteen; half, twenty-seven; barrel, thirty-six; hogshead, fifty-four. Each step is a multiple of the firkin, so a barrel equals four firkins or two kilderkins, and eight barrels make a tun.
- 6
- 7To place or pack goods into a barrel or barrels for storage or transport.
Each fall the farmers barrel their surplus pears for market.
The packers barreled the salted herring before dawn.
- 8A breaking wave that curls into a hollow, tube-shaped compartment a surfer can ride inside.
She disappeared into the barrel and shot out the other end.
The point break produces clean barrels on a strong swell.
Note
Surfing borrowed the cask's shape for the most enclosed ride a wave offers. The crest pitches forward and curls over, leaving a brief hollow tube in which a rider can travel ahead of the collapsing lip. Surfers speak of getting inside the barrel and coming out the other end. A break known for good ones is said to produce clean barrels.
- 9The short cylindrical section of a clarinet that connects the mouthpiece to the upper joint.
He replaced the barrel with a longer one to lower the pitch.
Moisture collects in the barrel during long rehearsals.
Note
Clarinetists treat the barrel as a tuning device as much as a connector. Its length affects the instrument's overall pitch, so players keep barrels of different lengths and swap them as needed. A longer barrel lowers the pitch and a shorter one raises it. The name comes from its shape: a short, rounded cylinder like a little cask.
- 10The rounded body of a horse or pony formed by the ribs and belly.
A deep barrel gives a horse room for strong lungs.
The vet ran her hands along the pony's barrel to check for swelling.
- 11A large cylindrical container used for collecting trash or refuse.
She dragged the barrel to the curb on collection day.
City workers emptied the barrels along the boardwalk every morning.
Note
New England English uses barrel where other American speakers say trash can or garbage can: a trash barrel, dragged to the curb on pickup day. Outside the region, the word suggests a wooden cask or an oil drum rather than refuse. In writing meant for a wider audience, the more general terms are clearer.
- 12In baseball, a batted-ball classification based on the combination of launch angle and exit velocity that tends to produce hits.
The analyst noted that the rookie produced more barrels than anyone else on the roster.
A barrel almost always falls for extra bases.
Note
Baseball analytics turned the word into a category of contact. A barrel is a ball struck with an exit velocity and launch angle in the range that has historically produced at least a .500 batting average and a 1.500 slugging percentage. Because barrels are counted rather than merely described, a hitter 'produces barrels' or leads the team in them.
- 13The hollow base of a feather, the lower section of the shaft that anchors it in the bird's skin.
Ink pens were once cut from the hollow barrel of a goose feather.
The barrels of the flight feathers are firmly seated in follicles along the wing.
Similarquill
Note
In anatomical terms the barrel is the calamus: the hollow, translucent foot of the shaft that carries no barbs and sits in the follicle. Above it the shaft becomes the rachis, which bears the barbed vanes. The barrel is the part a quill pen was cut from, so the word turns up in writing about pens as well as birds.
- 14In a carburetor, the venturi tube through which air is drawn and mixed with fuel.
The engine ran a carburetor with four barrels for high performance.
Air rushing through the barrel creates the suction that pulls in fuel.
Note
Mechanics count carburetors by their barrels: a four-barrel carburetor has four venturis drawing air at once. Inside each one the passage narrows, so the intake air speeds up and drops in pressure, and fuel is pulled into the airstream from the float chamber. In shorthand the word shrinks to bbl or V, so a 4bbl and a 4V name the same layout.
- 15Of a displayed image, to take on a convex, cask-like shape in which the sides bulge outward and straight lines bow away from the center.
Wide-angle footage tends to barrel, bending the horizon into a gentle curve.
The picture barreled slightly, so the building's edges looked rounded.
Note
The cask's shape put to technical use. In barrel distortion, magnification falls off away from the center of the image, so straight lines bow outward like the staves of the cask. It is said of screens, televisions and wide-angle footage. The image itself is the subject: the picture barrels, rather than something barreling it.
- 16In television and stage lighting, a tube mounted to the ceiling from which lighting instruments are hung.
Technicians rigged the new fixtures to the barrel before the broadcast.
Each barrel carried its own circuit so the lights could be controlled separately.
Note
Studio lighting hangs from these: overhead tubes that lanterns are clamped to, focused from and powered from. In Brian Fitt and Joe Thornley's Lighting Technology (2013), a motorized barrel is about 2 to 2.5 meters long and lifts up to 120 kg. Gerald Millerson's Lighting for TV and Film (2013) speaks of whole barrel networks, and notes the trouble of servicing lamps above high scenery when the network cannot be lowered.
- 17In the rodent somatosensory cortex, one of the dark-staining regions that receives touch signals from the opposite side of the body by way of the thalamus.
Researchers mapped how each barrel corresponds to an individual whisker on the snout.
Activity in the barrels increased when the animal's whiskers brushed an object.
Note
Neuroscience gives the word to dark-staining clusters of cells in layer IV of the rodent somatosensory cortex. Each barrel receives thalamic input carrying touch from a single whisker on the opposite side of the face. The cortex therefore holds a map of the snout, whisker by whisker, which is why barrels are a classic model for studying how touch is mapped in the brain.
- 18Any tube or hollow cylindrical pipe, regardless of its purpose.
The physician fitted a slender barrel to drain the wound.
Smoke escaped through narrow barrels set into the chimney wall.
Note
A survival from a time when barrel could name any tube, whatever its use. To a modern reader the general sense sounds old-fashioned, and the word calls up a cask. The tube meaning lives on only in particular uses, such as the barrel of a gun or a pen. For an ordinary pipe in present-day writing, tube is the safe choice; keep barrel for period color.
- 19A jar or earthen vessel used for storing food or liquids.
Note
Bible readers meet it in the King James Bible of 1611, where the widow has 'an handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse.' There barrel means a storage jar, not a staved cask. The sense is obsolete, so modern readers will picture a wooden barrel. Quote it where it appears, but do not use it in your own prose.
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Practice
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Origin
From Middle English "barel", borrowed from Anglo-Norman and Old French "baril" ("barrel"), of uncertain origin. One theory links it to a Germanic word for a transport container, from Proto-Indo-European "bʰer-" ("to carry"), which fits both the form and the meaning better than the alternative attempt to connect it to a word for "bar."