Anchor

How to spell anchor

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce anchor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does anchor mean?

1. nounA heavy metal device dropped from a boat to grip the seabed and hold the vessel in place.
2. verbTo secure or fix something firmly in place so it cannot move.
3. nounThe main presenter who leads a television or radio news programme.

Anchor in a sentence

• noun

  The crew lowered the anchor before the storm reached the harbour.

• verb

  Engineers used steel cables to anchor the bridge to the cliff face.

• noun

  The evening news anchor introduced each report from the studio.

• noun

  Rust had eaten through one fluke of the old iron anchor.

• verb

  We had to anchor the tent against the strong evening wind.

• noun

  She worked her way up from field reporter to prime-time anchor.

Where does anchor come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word entered Old English as 'ancor', borrowed from the Latin 'ancora', which in turn came from the Greek 'ankura', meaning a hook or a bent piece of metal. The original sense pictured the curved iron device that bites into the seabed to hold a ship in place, and from that physical image came the figurative idea of anything that gives stability or security. Notice that the early English and Latin forms had no -h-: it was scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who wrongly assumed a Greek 'ch' (chi) lay behind the word and inserted the silent -h-, giving us the modern 'anchor'. That spurious letter is precisely the spelling trap, since the word is pronounced with a plain 'k' sound and the -h- does nothing. The much later use of 'anchor' for a television news presenter grew from the idea of the person who holds a broadcast steady, much as an anchor holds a relay team or a ship.

How the word is built

• anchor (from Greek ankura: a hook or bent metal object); the medial -h- is a later, mistaken insertion