yard (2) — ODE

yard2 /jɑːd

▸ noun

1 mainly British English a piece of uncultivated ground adjoining a building, typically one enclosed by walls or other buildings:

tiny houses with the lavatory in the yard.

▪ North American English the garden of a house.

2 an area of land used for a particular purpose or business:

a builder's yard.

▪ (the Yard) British English informal another term for Scotland Yard

3 West Indian English a house and the land attached.

▪ an urban residential compound comprising a number of small rented dwellings around a shared open area.

▪ South African English a plot of land, or the grounds of a building, accommodating a number of small rooms let out as living space.

4 (Yard) (especially among expatriate Jamaicans) home; Jamaica:

life in Yard is no Caribbean holiday.

▸ verb [with object]

1 North American English store or transport (wood) in or to a timber yard:

he is the last logger to be using a sled for yarding logs

(yarding as noun) Canadian operators never practised yarding on a wider scale.

2 put (farm animals) into an enclosure:

sheep should be yarded even in the spring.

3 [no object] North American English (of moose) gather as a herd for the winter:

they note changes in the numbers of moose yarding together.

– ORIGIN Old English geard ‘building, home, region’, from a Germanic base related to Russian gorod ‘town’. Compare with garden and orchard.