Bollards
How to Pronounce "Bollard" (And Why It Matters in Specs)
Cojo
May 7, 2026
6 min read
The word "bollard" is pronounced BOL-erd (rhymes with "collard," as in collard greens). The first syllable carries the stress, the second syllable is unstressed and has a soft "uhrd" sound. The word originates from the maritime term for the short post on a ship's deck or dock to which a ship's mooring line is tied -- and it migrated into parking-lot, security, and traffic-engineering vocabulary by the early twentieth century. Getting the pronunciation right matters because specification calls, code reviews, and government RFP responses move faster when everyone uses the same word for the same product.
Standard American English pronunciation: BOL-erd. Two syllables. The first syllable rhymes with "doll" or the first syllable of "collar." The second syllable rhymes with "word" or the second syllable of "Edward." The "a" in the middle is a soft schwa sound, not a long "a" or a hard "ah."
Standard British English pronunciation is nearly identical: BOL-uhd, with the second syllable slightly softer because British English drops the trailing "r" in non-rhotic dialects. American specifiers and contractors hear both pronunciations regularly because much of the early academic literature on perimeter security bollards came out of British and Commonwealth engineering schools.
The pronunciation that is wrong: bo-LARD (with the stress on the second syllable, like "boulevard"). This is the most common first-encounter mispronunciation Cojo hears from property managers and architects new to the parking-products vocabulary. The first syllable always carries the stress.
The word entered English through Old French and Middle English maritime usage. The earliest documented English use cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the fourteenth century, referring to the short, heavy posts on a wharf used to secure a ship's mooring lines. The Middle French root -- "bole," meaning a tree trunk -- captures the original visual: a tree-trunk-shaped post embedded in a dock, sturdy enough to absorb the dynamic load of a moored vessel. The U.S. Library of Congress's maritime documentation collections include nineteenth-century engineering drawings of cast-iron mooring bollards that look strikingly similar to today's storefront protection posts.
The traffic-engineering use of the word emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as cities began installing fixed posts at street corners and pedestrian areas to keep horse-drawn vehicles off sidewalks. The Federal Highway Administration's archive of historical traffic-control documents shows "bollard" appearing in U.S. urban-planning literature by the 1910s. By the post-World War II expansion of parking-lot construction, the word had fully migrated from maritime vocabulary into the parking-products vocabulary it occupies today.
The reason this article is on a parking-products website is not because pronunciation determines whether a post stops a truck. The reason is professional credibility on specification calls. Three scenarios where pronunciation matters:
City permit reviewers, fire marshals, and ADA compliance officers use the term "bollard" multiple times per week. A property owner or architect who mispronounces the term on a code-review call signals unfamiliarity with the product category and with the regulatory framework. The U.S. Access Board's ADA Standards (Section 307) explicitly use the term "bollard" in describing protruding-object compliance; speaking the same vocabulary as the standards keeps the conversation efficient.
ASTM F2656 crash-rated bollard procurement is a federal-facility activity governed by the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. General Services Administration, and the Department of Homeland Security. Vendor calls, product demos, and proposal defenses are vocabulary-heavy. Mispronunciation on a high-stakes RFP signals an underprepared bidder.
Risk-management conversations following a vehicle-into-storefront incident involve insurance adjusters, attorneys, and code experts. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting program tracks vehicle-into-storefront incidents at roughly 22,000 per year nationally; the post-incident vocabulary uses "bollard" as the named product category. Confident pronunciation accelerates a difficult conversation.
Search query data confirms three common misspellings tied to mispronunciation. Each variant shows up in U.S. search volume:
| Misspelling | Likely Mispronunciation | Correct Spelling |
|---|---|---|
| Ballard | bah-LARD | Bollard |
| Bullard | BULL-erd | Bollard |
| Bolard | bo-LARD | Bollard |
A handful of related terms get used interchangeably in casual conversation but have specific meanings in product specification. See our types of bollards deep dive for the full taxonomy. Quick reference:
A practitioner who says "BOL-erd" rather than "bo-LARD" or "bah-LARD" signals familiarity with the product category and the regulatory framework that governs it. For more on what bollards actually do see our bollards buyer's guide.
Cojo's lead estimator (NICET Level III certified) speaks "bollard" daily in site walks, code reviews, and customer scope conversations. In April 2026 the Salem retail-anchor storefront retrofit included a 90-minute code-review call with the city permit office; the word "bollard" came up 38 times in that single call. In the same month a Hillsboro warehouse fire-lane install required a fire-marshal walkthrough where "bollard" was the named product category in the IFC Section 503 compliance documentation. Vocabulary fluency is part of the deliverable.
Vocabulary is part of the product. Cojo's site walks use the standard parking-products vocabulary because it tracks with what city permit offices, fire marshals, and ADA reviewers expect to hear. Get a custom quote.
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