veranda

noun

ve·​ran·​da və-ˈran-də 

variants or verandah

: a usually roofed open gallery or portico attached to the exterior of a building

Synonyms

• porch

Examples of veranda in a Sentence

whiling away the afternoon from the inn's wide veranda

Recent Examples on the Web

Not with the violence of waves, but with the lull of porch laughter, with voices passed down from one veranda to the next. —Shelby Stewart, Essence, 23 July 2025

Standing out within the primary dwelling is a fireside living room flaunting a row of French doors spilling out to a covered veranda. —Wendy Bowman, Robb Report, 10 July 2025

While there are only renderings of the rooms (for now), the vision includes light wood floors, bright white linens, separate sleeping and living spaces, and massive floor-to-ceiling windows and doors that open to verandas, allowing the Egyptian sun to illuminate every inch of the ship. —Stacey Leasca, Travel + Leisure, 27 June 2025

The property features several verandas, loggias, and panoramic atriums that shift throughout the day and across seasons, each one offering a unique experience under the changing light of the Italian sun. —Tereza Shkurtaj, People.com, 14 June 2025

Word History

Etymology

borrowed perhaps via an Indo-Portuguese creole from Portuguese varanda, akin to Spanish baranda "railing" (earlier, "balcony, floor of a building"), Catalan barana "railing," Old Occitan baranda "barrier, barricade," all going back to *varanda "enclosing barrier, the area enclosed," of obscure origin; reinforced by Hindi & Urdu baraṇḍā "roofed gallery," Marathi varãḍ, varãḍā "parapet," in part borrowed from Portuguese varanda and English veranda, in part going back to Sanskrit varaṇḍaka- "mound of earth, rampart separating two fighting elephants," varaṇḍa- "partition wall"

Note: An Anglo-Indian word, most of the early evidence for which is cited in Yule and Burnell's Hobson-Jobson (2nd edition 1903) and the Oxford English Dictionary. The superficial similarity in form and meaning of the Romance and Indo-Aryan words is striking enough that the Romance scholar Joan Coromines attempted to connect them, positing an Indo-European substratal noun as the source of both, to which he added Lithuanian (Žemaitian dialect) varanda "loop plaited from flexible twigs" (Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico). It is questionable, however, if the original meanings of the three etyma are really closely comparable, so that the phonetic likeness may simply be coincidence. The Romance word has been connected with Spanish and Portuguese vara "rod, pole" and other progeny of Latin vāra "forked pole," but, as Coromines points out, the deverbal suffix -anda would require the existence of an otherwise unknown verb *varar; other Romance forms descended from a variant *varandia/varania (see Coromines) make such a hypothesis even less likely.

First Known Use

1711, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for veranda

• aranda
• miranda
• verandah
• banda
• ganda
• panda
• vanda
• jacaranda
• memoranda
• propaganda

Kids Definition

veranda

noun

ve·​ran·​da

variants or verandah

və-ˈran-də 

: a long open porch usually with a roof