bedstead

Etymology

It is inherited from Middle English bedstede,^[2][3][4] formed from English bed + stead.^[5][6][7] The second element is from Old English stede (“place, position”).^[6] Compare Old Frisian bedstede, Middle Dutch beddestat, Dutch bedstede, Middle Low German beddestēde, Middle High German bettestat and German Bettstatt, which all denote a place for a bed or for sleeping.^[5]

Earliest recorded meaning

A place laid out for sleeping or resting: 1440, in the Promptorium Parvulorum.^[5] Etymonline dates the word to about 1400,^[6] and Dictionary.com to 1400–50.^[3]

Semantic evolution

As its second element suggests, the word first meant the place where a bed stands; the 1989 edition of the OED remarks that this meaning had long since passed to the stand on which a bed is raised.^[8][5] The OED's first record of the framework is from about 1475, in the Catholicon Anglicum.^[5] Johnson (1755) already defined it as the frame on which the bed is placed.^[7] Early frames carried the mattress on cords, later ones on springs.^[5]

Timeline

• 1440 – a place to sleep or rest (obsolete; the OED's last record is from 1450).^[5]
• c. 1475 – the framework of wood or metal that supports a bed.^[5]

Meanings

Noun

1. The framework of a bed, usually with a head and foot and connecting rails, that supports the mattress: They carried the iron bedstead up to the attic in pieces.^[9][2][5]

Related words

• stead

Usage notes

The Dictionary of American Regional English records a pronunciation ending in -stid, chiefly in the South and South Midland, with the spellings bedstid and stid and the short form stead; its first example of the form is from North Carolina in 1751.^[10] Merriam-Webster Unabridged also records a variant ending in /-stəd/.^[2]

References

1. ^ Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
3. ^ a b Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
4. ^ Stratmann, Francis Henry (1891), A Middle-English Dictionary, revised by Henry Bradley, Oxford: Clarendon Press
5. ^ a b c d e f g h i Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ a b c Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
7. ^ a b Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
8. ^ Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
9. ^ Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
10. ^ Cassidy, Frederic G. & Joan Houston Hall (eds.) (1985–2002), Dictionary of American Regional English, vols I–IV, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press