noun
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the linear extent or measurement of something from side to side, usually being the shortest dimension or (for something fixed) the shortest horizontal dimension
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the state or fact of being wide
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a piece or section of something at its full extent from side to side
a width of cloth
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the distance across a rectangular swimming bath, as opposed to its length
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of width
Explanation
The noun width means the measurement of an object from one side to the other. The width of your twin bed is less than the width of your parents' queen-sized bed. When you're talking about the dimensions of something, specifically how wide it is, you're discussing its width. The width of your backyard might not lend itself to a full croquet court, but you can still play horseshoes back there. And the width of the streets in some Midwestern cities might surprise you if you're used to narrow New England roads. Before the word width gained popularity in the 1620s, people used the now less common wideness instead.
Vocabulary lists containing width
Geometry - Introductory
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Measurement and Data, List 2
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Geometry (Base List)
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Images that clearly showed the crater rim allowed researchers to measure its width at about 60 feet.
From Science Daily ● Aug. 20, 2026
The full-back and winger would regularly combine on the outside, but the relationship was never as simple as one holding the width and the other supporting underneath statically.
From BBC ● Aug. 10, 2026
The machines use focused beams of ultraviolet light to etch on wafers of silicon billions of transistors roughly the width of a strand of DNA.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 24, 2026
They changed the width of the antennas as well as the size and placement of the corrugations.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 22, 2026
They don’t measure anything that we are accustomed to, like length, breadth, width, or time.
From "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife
Like walking museum plaques, they glided through rooms in silk brocade gowns, panniers extending their hips to improbable widths, dispensing facts about furnishings.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 16, 2026
The team selected locations with different river volumes, widths, channel types and glacial silt content.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 15, 2024
For each material, you can choose among a variety of depths and widths.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 28, 2023
The plan is to send multiple pipes of differing widths through the estimated 60m debris wall to create a micro-tunnel through which the workers can crawl out of the tunnel.
From BBC ● Nov. 22, 2023
As you can see, making smaller and smaller rectangles—whose widths, denoted by the symbol Δx, go to zero—makes the value closer and closer to 32, the true value for the area of the triangle.
From "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
