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carpenter

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈkɑː.pən.tə//
  • United States//ˈkɑɹpəntɚ//
  • United States//ˈkɑɹpəndɚ//

A person skilled at carpentry, the trade of cutting and joining timber in order to construct buildings or other structures.

noun

  1. 1

    A person skilled at carpentry, the trade of cutting and joining timber in order to construct buildings or other structures.

  2. 2

    A senior rating in ships responsible for all the woodwork onboard; in the days of sail, a warrant officer responsible for the hull, masts, spars and boats of a ship, and whose responsibility was to sound the well to see if the ship was making water.

  3. 3

    A two-wheeled carriage.

  4. 4

    A carpenter bee.

    The large, stout African bees are carpenters (Xylocopa), making small tunnels in timber, housing few individuals.

  5. 5

    A woodlouse.

Etymology

From Middle English carpenter, from Anglo-Norman carpenter (compare Old French charpentier), from Late Latin carpentārius (“a carpenter”), from Latin carpentārius (“a wagon-maker, carriage-maker”), from Latin carpentum (“a two-wheeled carriage, coach, or chariot, a cart”), from Gaulish carbantos, from Proto-Celtic *karbantos (“chariot, war chariot”), probably related to Proto-Celtic *karros (“wagon”). Doublet of carpintero. More at car. Displaced native Old English trēowwyrhta (literally “tree worker”).

verb

  1. 1

    To work as a carpenter, cutting and joining timber.

Forms

plural
carpenters
past tense
carpentered
past participle
carpentered
present participle
carpentering
third person singular
carpenters
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).