Noun
the roof of a car
The roof of the old barn collapsed.
He bit into a hot slice of pizza and burned the roof of his mouth. Verb
fed and roofed the emergency volunteers for a week
Recent Examples on the Web
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to
show current usage.Read More
Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.
Send us feedback.
Noun
New data centers packed with GPUs meant new electricity demands — so much so that the appetite for power would go through the roof.—Cade Metz, New York Times, 17 Mar. 2025 Nero Wolfe, who is loath to set foot outside his brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street, is obsessed with orchids and dedicates four hours a day to tending to them in his plant rooms on the roof.—Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, 17 Mar. 2025
Verb
Carlsson settled a chaotic sequence calmly and roofed a backhand from close range for his first goal, and then carried the puck across three zones before pulling up for a precise shot from just above the right faceoff dot.—Andrew Knoll, Orange County Register, 3 Mar. 2025 This includes brush and rubbish, concrete, brick, rock, wood, paper, plastics, cardboard and roofing shingles and tiles.—Elizabeth Campbell, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 25 Feb. 2025 See All Example Sentences for roof
Word History
Etymology
Noun
Middle English, from Old English hrōf; akin to Old Norse hrōf roof of a boathouse and perhaps to Old Church Slavic stropŭ roof
First Known Use
Noun
before the 12th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1a(1)
: the vaulted upper boundary of the mouth supported largely by the palatine bones and limited anteriorly by the dental lamina and posteriorly by the uvula and upper part of the fauces
2
: a covering structure of any of various parts of the body other than the mouth
Share