Origin:
1275–1325; Middle English < Middle French barriere (barre bar¹ + -iere < Latin -āria -ary); replacing Middle English barrere < Anglo-French < Medieval Latin barrera

Synonyms
1. palisade, wall. 1–3. obstruction, hindrance, impediment. See bar¹.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
Cite This Source

Link To barrier

:10

:09

:08

:07

:06

:05

:04

:03

:02

:01

Barrier is always a great word to know.

So is gobo. Does it mean:

a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.

a screen or mat covered with a dark material for shielding a camera lens from excess light or glare.

LEARN MORE UNUSUAL WORDS WITH WORD DYNAMO...

Example Sentences

Remedial math has become an insurmountable barrier for many students, ending their aspirations for higher education.

Regulations covering the financial services industry are designed to act as a barrier to rogues and villains.

She translates those patterns into batiks-artworks that also aid her mission to preserve the barrier islands.

EXPAND

Remedial math has become an insurmountable barrier for many students, ending their aspirations for higher education.

Regulations covering the financial services industry are designed to act as a barrier to rogues and villains.

She translates those patterns into batiks-artworks that also aid her mission to preserve the barrier islands.

The soy sauce here appears to be poured directly on the skin, and the skin should be acting as a barrier.

There's an education barrier too, to how these decisions are made.

After all, it is a barrier between house and street.

Micro wires represent a means of erecting an impenetrable barrier to deny access to an area or building.

But in developing countries, the logistics of immunizing millions of children pre-sent a significant barrier.

Substances that cannot cross this barrier are unlikely to make effective treatments for a brain disease.

Barrier methods prevent pests from getting to plants.

Stem cells injected past this barrier can migrate to regions where they are needed and develop into new brain cells.

There is only what seems to me a rather low protective barrier given the precipitous drop into the deep valleys below.

Use as woodland ground cover, facing for taller mahonias, low barrier plant.

Another benefit of blue food dye is it crosses the blood-brain barrier.

The high cost of a more personalized education isn't the only barrier facing older law schools.

The birds were sat, one at a time, on a perch on one side of a room divided by a barrier.

As a result the skin may become a less effective barrier.

The film he created was not only edible and transparent, but it was also a barrier to moisture and a better barrier to oxygen.

Contestants tended to eye the barrier respectfully: the punishment for false starts was a thrashing from official whip bearers.

Encircle young seedlings with a barrier of copper flashing to deter pests.

When switched on, the parallax barrier controls the direction at which the light leaves the display and the way it hits your eyes.

Teams of ships have skimmed up millions of barrels of oily water, and unfurled miles of barrier boom.

Magnetic tunnel junctions have two ferromagnetic layers separated by a thin insulating barrier.

Fine bank cover or low traffic barrier add to my plant list.

No one knows what happens when a car pierces the barrier.

So the dissolved pollutants remain trapped on the warm side of the barrier.

CO2 or any such heat barrier is sheer fantasy and scientificalkly baseless.

We have always tried our best to line our wooden veggie bed walls with some sort of barrier in case of chemical leeching.

OK, that might be a nice barrier against self-indulgence for some, but it still feels limiting.

Logically, though, there is another answer to the question of how to jump the species barrier.

As explanation, it faces a high improbability barrier.

Or you can surround the edges of pots and raised beds with copper barrier tape.

Reducing the cost barrier of that business model to zero changes things considerably.

But the biggest barrier to an effective financial market may be demography.

The surface oxidation forms a barrier that tends to protect the aluminium from rusting further.

Scientists and engineers involved have already pointed out that public perceptions are a potential barrier to progress.

The boundary of the sphere, the wall of fire, is not an actual physical barrier.

Mobile readiness, however, is not the only barrier keeping mobile users from accessing the web.

The other particle has a chance to tunnel outside the gravitational potential barrier of the black hole.

Some clever geologic sleuthing has revealed how that barrier was.

The second of the two steps involves taking sound barrier curtains and outlining the perimeter area in front of the computers.

Once that psychological barrier is gone then it will unleash the flood.

Explore neighborhoods, take a virtual dive to a barrier reef, and show your ecosystem savvy with a habitats quiz.

We learned that a solitary kidney transplant without a genetic barrier could function normally.

You've crossed the barrier between academia and application with those systems.

So even if you don't have a policy background, it's not as much of a barrier as you might think.

Coastal erosion has increased as melting sea ice is unable to provide the protective barrier it did in the past.

It has proved to be a powerful barrier in restricting pathogens from reaching your faucet and making you ill.

Google says facial identification isn't included, for privacy reasons, but one wonders how long that barrier will last.

Distribution has moved from major barrier to trivial expense.

The evolution of rust to overcome this genetic barrier enabled the disease to spread.

It puts far less of a barrier between you and your subject than a full-sized camera.

More broadly, an even larger barrier to the flourishing of global higher education is psychological:.

Nor would he be the first to break a religious barrier.

As the men-at-arms in the front lines fell, they then formed an additional barrier that their countrymen had to.

But the new players also present a barrier that's tough for a true music lover to hurdle: storage space.

Another barrier is going to be trusting that an open-source project is sustainable.

Something even more impenetrable than a language barrier is at work.

They easily breached that barrier by jumping onto the netting from a nearby tree and chewing their way through.

He's considering using housewrap, a weather barrier material, as a base and painting ads on top of.

At the same time, though, she gives teachers an insight that can help break down a communication barrier.

It lowers the barrier to entry for new players by allowing people to play games without having to pay anything.

Gee, folks, let's get past the bacteria/virus barrier.

But the biggest barrier to high-tech healthcare is doctors' concerns about the security of computer systems.

The biggest barrier to apples-to-apples comparisons is the educational product itself: the degree.

First, a substantial technical barrier must be removed.

But a new therapy finally broke through that barrier yesterday.

However, my lack of expertise does give me greater appreciation for things that lower the barrier to creating music.

But we–that is, our grad program–cannot seem to break through the barrier of non-regional offers.

They have found that the eyewall is indeed a sturdy barrier.

But recent research is breaking down that barrier to find out how self-aware animals are.

It's a totally safe contraceptive method that puts barrier and pill methods to shame.

So there are some politics involved in this language barrier as well.

Microcredit clearly allowed more people to overcome the barrier posed by start-up costs.

We simply wanted to lower the barrier of participation for everyone in the newsroom.

It would be a huge barrier for exchange programs if students were suddenly required pay the fees for the partner universities.

At night a vast yellow barrier descends on the crossing, trapping latecomers inside.

Roads also fragment and isolate turtle habitats by establishing a barrier to migration and the movement of individuals.

And it's my dad's loss for putting that barrier up in their relationship.

The companies also dispute the idea that patents are the main barrier preventing medicine from reaching poor people.

But using a drug to dissolve this barrier restored the older rats' ability to extinguish fearful memories.

The federation recommends that universities avoid the suite entirely until all barrier issues are resolved.

The nucleonic barrier is absolutely impregnable to finite relations.

Digital games are flashy, but board and card games offer the advantages of structured play with a lower barrier to entry.

The report identifies a lack of adequate staffing as a standing barrier to the success of library-based publishing.

It is not that difficult to communicate that there is a barrier between you and the students that the students dare not cross.

For the non-privileged, race is a barrier to be overcome.

Our unions are often the final barrier against unsafe roads and hospitals, ersatz education and filth in our food.

COLLAPSE

Collins

World English Dictionary

barrier (ˈbærɪə)

—n
1.	anything serving to obstruct passage or to maintain separation, such as a fence or gate
2.	anything that prevents or obstructs passage, access, or progress: a barrier of distrust
3.	anything that separates or hinders union: a language barrier
4.	a. an exposed offshore sand bar separated from the shore by a lagoon
	b. (as modifier): a barrier beach
5.	(sometimes capital) that part of the Antarctic icecap extending over the sea

[C14: from Old French barriere, from barrebar¹]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
Cite This Source

Etymonline

Word Origin & History

barrier

early 14c., from O.Fr. barriere "obstacle, gatekeeper," from barre "bar" (see bar (1)). First record of barrier reef is from 1805.

American Heritage

Medical Dictionary

barrier bar·ri·er (bār'ē-ər)
n.

A structure, such as a fence, built to bar passage.
A boundary or limit.
An obstacle or impediment.
Something that separates or holds apart.
Something immaterial that obstructs or impedes behavior.
A physical or biological factor that limits the migration, interbreeding, or free movement of individuals or populations.

Partners:Word Bloglines Citysearch The Daily Beast Ask Answers Ask Kids Life123 Sendori Thesaurus

About Privacy Policy Terms of Use API Careers Advertise with Us Contact Us Help