Beak

How to spell beak

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce beak

What does beak mean?

1. nounThe hard, projecting mouthpart of a bird, used for feeding and pecking.

Beak in a sentence

• The parrot cracked the seed with its powerful beak.

• A heron uses its long beak to spear fish in the shallows.

Where does beak come from?

Language of origin: French

Beak entered Middle English in the 1200s as 'bec' or 'beke', borrowed from the Old French 'bec', which named the horny bill of a bird. Old French in turn took the word from the Latin 'beccus', a term the Roman writer Suetonius explicitly recorded as being of Gaulish (an early Celtic) origin. The literal sense throughout was the pointed mouthpart of a bird, and from there English speakers cheerfully extended it to anything sharply jutting, such as a person's prominent nose. The spelling is reassuringly phonetic, with the long 'ee' sound written 'ea' as in 'peak' and 'leak'. In later British slang the same word came to mean a magistrate or a schoolmaster, a colloquial use of uncertain origin that has nothing to do with the bird but reused the same short, blunt word.

How the word is built

• beak (single root, from Old French bec: bill of a bird); no prefix or suffix