Bucks

How to spell bucks

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bucks

What does bucks mean?

1. nounDollars, or money in general, used informally.
2. nounMore than one buck, meaning male deer, goats, or rabbits.
3. verbSprings upward with an arched back, or resists and opposes something.

Bucks in a sentence

• noun

  The repair cost me a few hundred bucks.

• noun

  Two bucks grazed at the edge of the woodland at dawn.

• verb

  The wild horse always bucks when a stranger tries to mount it.

• noun

  He saved enough bucks to put a deposit on a flat.

• noun

  The breeder kept the bucks separate from the does.

• verb

  The new manager often bucks against company tradition.

Where does bucks come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word 'buck' comes from Old English 'bucca', meaning a male goat, and the related 'bucc', a male deer; both trace back to a Germanic root for the male of horned or antlered animals. From the leaping, kicking behaviour of such animals came the verb 'to buck', meaning to spring upward with arched back, recorded from the early 1800s and quickly applied to horses throwing their riders. The slang use for money, almost always in the plural 'bucks', is American and dates to the 1800s; the most widely accepted explanation is that buckskins, the hides of male deer, were a common unit of trade between settlers and Native Americans, so a 'buck' became shorthand for a dollar. The spelling stays simple and Germanic throughout, with the trap being only the plural -cks cluster rather than any silent letter.

How the word is built

• buck (the base word)
• -s (plural noun ending, or third-person singular verb ending)