Past tense of berth; anchored or docked a ship at a berth, or assigned someone a sleeping place on a ship.
From Old Norse 'bjorgr' (refuge) evolved to Middle English 'berth' (anchoring place), becoming a verb meaning to place a ship or person in such a location.
When ships berthed in the 1800s, captains had to become expert mathematicians—calculating tides, wind currents, and ship momentum to safely dock a massive vessel without modern technology was essentially a physics problem solved through experience!
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