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Wheelbarrow or Wheelbarrel? It's Wheelbarrow you fuck sticks. I overheard a landscaper yesterday talking to his colleagues about a "wheelbarrel". This is an occasional mistake people make; indeed when I worked at the Canadian Oxford Dictionary department we had a letter from someone who said she had a bet with her boyfriend about it and a pizza was riding on the outcome!

It's not surprising that people change "barrow" into "barrel" because "barrow", originally something like a stretcher on legs with shafts by which it could be lifted, is not a common word anymore. This phenomenon of exchanging an unfamiliar word to a similar sounding familiar one has been quite common over the course of the history of the language. For instance, as we saw earlier, the Old English word "goom" became "groom".

Another phenomenon favouring the understanding of "Barrow" as "barrel" is that terminal l's are often swallowed up in speech, or in some varieties of the language turned into a vowel, so some people will say "barrel" as if it were "barrew".

"Barrel" came into English from French; its ultimate origin is unknown. "Barrow", on the other hand, like most garden equipment terms, likely goes back to Anglo-Saxon, related to the word "bear" (carry).

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