Anchor

There are two words (together with derivatives for each) written thus: anchor. Although the two meanings are distinct, they have influenced each other in various shades of meaning, notably the figurative. The first (and older) is currently far more common.

• The commoner noun by far in current English is anchor as the name of the weighty object designed with apporopriate holding devices, commonly hooked or semi-hooked, by which, through a fastening called the anchor cable, a ship or boat may be held fast to the solid ground of thed sea-bed below.
  • The sheet anchor was normally the biggest on board, and used only in extreme emergency. It has been used figuratively as "That on which one places one's reliance when everything else has failed" (OED 1914), s.v. sheet anchor meaning 1 b..
  • The bower (rhymes with'power', IPA: /ˈbaʊ ə^r/ anchor was one of two carried in larger vessels at the bows - the best bower and the small-bower.
  • The kedge anchor was a smaller anchor used especially in towing a vessel by giving it a secure hold on which the crew might haul to change the vessel's orientation or position in an operation known as kedging or warping.

Etymological note: this anchor (formerly spelled ancre, ankyr, ankre etc.) is derived from the Latin ancora, related to the Greek ἄνκūρα, from a root meaning 'bend', 'crook', 'hook' (from which English also derives 'angle'). It is curious that the sport of angling may be carried out from a boat that is at anchor. (Note that the Latin cited above has no '-h-': OED says that it was "sometimes erron[eously] spelt anchora", adding "The current spelling anchor is a pedantic corruption, imitating the erroneous Latin anchora."

• The currently less common anchor' is the earliest form of what is more commonly called an anchorite, an epicene noun. although there is a feminine form anchoress. All three denote someone who opted for an intensely solitary religious life, in its classic form by being walled up alone in a cell constructed within a church, sometimes within a wall of a church; the anchorite could see the altar through a squint or opedning in the wallsa of the cell. This wasknowsn aas an anchor-hold or anchorage.