What is "yard"

Yard \Yard\, n. [OE. yard, yerd, AS. geard; akin to OFries. garda garden, OS. gardo garden, gard yard, D. gaard garden, G. garten, OHG. garto garden, gari inclosure, Icel. gar[eth]r yard, house, Sw. g[*a]rd, Dan. gaard, Goth. gards a house, garda sheepfold, L. hortus garden, Gr. cho`rtos an inclosure. Cf. Court, Garden, Garth, Horticulture, Orchard.]

1. An inclosure; usually, a small inclosed place in front of, or around, a house or barn; as, a courtyard; a cowyard; a barnyard.

   A yard . . . inclosed all about with sticks In which she had a cock, hight chanticleer.
   --Chaucer.

2. An inclosure within which any work or business is carried on; as, a dockyard; a shipyard.

   Liberty of the yard, a liberty, granted to persons imprisoned for debt, of walking in the yard, or within any other limits prescribed by law, on their giving bond not to go beyond those limits.

   Prison yard, an inclosure about a prison, or attached to it.

   Yard grass (Bot.), a low-growing grass ( Eleusine Indica) having digitate spikes. It is common in dooryards, and like places, especially in the Southern United States. Called also crab grass.

   Yard of land. See Yardland.

Yard \Yard\, n. [OE. yerd, AS. gierd, gyrd, a rod, stick, a measure, a yard; akin to OFries. ierde, OS. gerda, D. garde, G. gerte, OHG. gartia, gerta, gart, Icel. gaddr a goad, sting, Goth. gazds, and probably to L. hasta a spear. Cf. Gad, n., Gird, n., Gride, v. i., Hastate.]

1. A rod; a stick; a staff. [Obs.]
   --P. Plowman.

   If men smote it with a yerde.
   --Chaucer.

2. A branch; a twig. [Obs.]

   The bitter frosts with the sleet and rain Destroyed hath the green in every yerd.
   --Chaucer.

3. A long piece of timber, as a rafter, etc. [Obs.]

4. A measure of length, equaling three feet, or thirty-six inches, being the standard of English and American measure.

5. The penis.

6. (Naut.) A long piece of timber, nearly cylindrical, tapering toward the ends, and designed to support and extend a square sail. A yard is usually hung by the center to the mast. See Illust. of Ship.

7. (Zo["o]l.) A place where moose or deer herd together in winter for pasture, protection, etc.

   Golden Yard, or Yard and Ell (Astron.), a popular name of the three stars in the belt of Orion.

   Under yard [i. e., under the rod], under contract. [Obs.]
   --Chaucer.

Yard \Yard\, v. t. To confine (cattle) to the yard; to shut up, or keep, in a yard; as, to yard cows.

"patch of ground around a house," Old English geard "fenced enclosure, garden, court; residence, house," from Proto-Germanic *gardaz (cognates: Old Norse garðr "enclosure, garden, yard;" Old Frisian garda, Dutch gaard, Old High German garto, German Garten "garden;" Gothic gards "house," garda "stall"), from PIE *ghor-to-, suffixed form of root *gher- (1) "to grasp, enclose," with derivatives meaning "enclosure" (cognates: Old English gyrdan "to gird," Sanskrit ghra- "house," Albanian garth "hedge," Latin hortus "garden," Phrygian -gordum "town," Greek khortos "pasture," Old Irish gort "field," Breton garz "enclosure, garden," and second element in Latin cohors "enclosure, yard, company of soldiers, multitude").\n

\nLithuanian gardas "pen, enclosure," Old Church Slavonic gradu "town, city," and Russian gorod, -grad "town, city" belong to this group, but linguists dispute whether they are independent developments or borrowings from Germanic. As "college campus enclosed by the main buildings," 1630s. In railway usage, "ground adjacent to a train station or terminus, used for switching or coupling trains," 1827. Yard sale is attested by 1976.

measure of length, Old English gerd (Mercian), gierd (West Saxon) "rod, staff, stick; measure of length," from West Germanic *gazdijo, from Proto-Germanic *gazdjo- "stick, rod" (cognates: Old Saxon gerda, Old Frisian ierde, Dutch gard "rod;" Old High German garta, German gerte "switch, twig," Old Norse gaddr "spike, sting, nail"), from PIE root *ghazdh-o- "rod, staff, pole" (cognates: Latin hasta "shaft, staff"). The nautical yard-arm retains the original sense of "stick."\n

\nOriginally in Anglo-Saxon times a land measure of roughly 5 meters (a length later called rod, pole, or perch). Modern measure of "three feet" is attested from late 14c. (earlier rough equivalent was the ell of 45 inches, and the verge). In Middle English and after, the word also was a euphemism for "penis" (as in "Love's Labour's Lost," V.ii.676). Slang meaning "one hundred dollars" first attested 1926, American English. Middle English yerd (Old English gierd) also was "yard-land, yard of land," a varying measure but often about 30 acres or a quarter of a hide.

Etymology 1 n. A small, usually uncultivated area adjoining or (now especially) within the precincts of a house or other building (http://en.wikipedi

1. org/wiki/Yard%20(land)). v

2. (context transitive English) To confine to a yard. Etymology 2

   n. A unit of length equal to 3 feet in the US customary and British imperial systems of measurement, equal to precisely 0.9144 meter since 1959 (US) or 1963 (UK). Etymology 3

   n. (context finance English) 10⁹, A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long%20and%20short%20scales billion#English; a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long%20and%20short%20scales thousand millions or milliard.

1. n. a unit of length equal to 3 feet; defined as 91.44 centimeters; originally taken to be the average length of a stride [syn: pace]

2. the enclosed land around a house or other building; "it was a small house with almost no yard" [syn: grounds, curtilage]

3. a tract of land enclosed for particular activities (sometimes paved and usually associated with buildings); "they opened a repair yard on the edge of town"

4. an area having a network of railway tracks and sidings for storage and maintenance of cars and engines [syn: railway yard]

5. an enclosure for animals (as chicken or livestock)

6. a unit of volume (as for sand or gravel) [syn: cubic yard]

7. a long horizontal spar tapered at the end and used to support and spread a square sail or lateen

8. the cardinal number that is the product of 10 and 100 [syn: thousand, one thousand, 1000, M, K, chiliad, G, grand, thou]

A yard is a spar on a mast from which sails are set. It may be constructed of timber or steel or from more modern materials like aluminium or carbon fibre. Although some types of fore and aft rigs have yards, the term is usually used to describe the horizontal spars used on square rigged sails. In addition, for some decades after square sails were generally dispensed with, some yards were retained for deploying wireless (radio) aerials and signal flags.

A yard is an area of land immediately adjacent to a building or a group of buildings. It may be either enclosed or open. The word comes from the same linguistic root as the word garden and has many of the same meanings.

A number of derived words exist, usually tied to a particular usage or building type. Some may be archaic or in lesser use now. Examples of such words are: courtyard, barnyard, hopyard, graveyard, churchyard, brickyard, prison yard, railyard, junkyard and stableyard.

Yard is a 21-story, -tall apartment building under construction at the Burnside Bridgehead in Portland, Oregon's Kerns neighborhood, in the United States. It was designed by Skylab Architecture for Key Development Co. of Hood River and Guardian Real Estate Services of Portland.

The yard (abbreviation: yd) is an English unit of length, in both the British imperial and US customary systems of measurement, that comprises 3 feet or 36 inches. It is by international agreement in 1959 standardized as exactly 0.9144 meters. A metal yardstick originally formed the physical standard from which all other units of length were officially derived in both English systems.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, increasingly powerful microscopes and scientific measurement detected variation in these prototype yards which became significant as technology improved. In 1959, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa agreed to adopt the Canadian compromise value of 0.9144 meters per yard.

A yard is an imperial/US customary (non-metric) unit of length (3 feet).

Yard may also refer to:

• Square yard, an imperial/US customary (non-metric) unit of area (9 square feet)
• Cubic yard, an imperial/US customary (non-metric) unit of volume (27 cubic feet)
• Megalithic yard, a theoretical unit of prehistoric measurement
• Yard glass, an extremely long beer glass
• Yard (land), an open or enclosed land area, traditionally adjacent to one or more buildings
  • Back yard, the property behind a house, often fenced
  • Barnyard, near a farm's barn
  • Churchyard, near a church
  • Courtyard, surrounded by walls
  • Front yard, the property in front of a house
  • Graveyard, cemetery or burial ground
  • Stableyard, near a stable for horses
• Yard (Portland, Oregon), an apartment building
• Yard (sailing), a spar on a traditional sailing ship
• YARD (software), a documentation generator for the Ruby programming language
• Yards Brewing Company, a brewery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
• Yard, used in British, South African, Forex, and money markets as slang for a thousand million units ( short-scale billion, formerly milliard)
  • Milliard, the number 1,000,000,000 (10)
• Scotland Yard or "The Yard," headquarters for London's Metropolitan Police Service
• Yardbird, slang term and the name of a band The Yardbirds
• Yardie, Jamaican slang term
• Brickyard, a place where bricks are made or stored
• Prison yard, a walled or fenced, often open-air space in a jail or prison
• Rail yard, complex of railroad tracks for storing, sorting, or loading/unloading, railroad cars and/or locomotives
• Skin Yard, an American grunge band from Seattle, Washington, U.S.

People:

• Douglas Yard, appointed a judge of the Family Division of the Court of Queen's Bench of Manitoba on October 7, 1998
• Ernie Yard (1941–2004), Scottish association footballer
• Molly Yard (1912–2005), an American feminist of the late 20th century
• Robert Sterling Yard (1861–1945), an American writer, journalist, and wilderness activist

YARD, is an embedded documentation generator for the Ruby programming language. It analyzes the Ruby source code, generating a structured collection of pages for Ruby objects and methods. Code comments can be added in a natural style.

YARD is useful even if the target source code does not contain explicit comments. YARD will still parse the classes, modules, and methods, and list them in the generated API files.

YARD extends upon the capabilities of RDoc in a number of dimensions:

• extensibility
• modularity
• parsing

Dan Kubb has created an ancillary tool, named Yardstick, which verifies YARD (or RDoc) documentation coverage.