Cloak

How to spell cloak

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cloak

What does cloak mean?

1. nounA loose outer garment worn over the shoulders, without sleeves, fastened at the neck.
2. verbTo hide or disguise something so it cannot be seen or recognised.

Cloak in a sentence

• noun

  She fastened her wool cloak against the cold wind.

• verb

  The company tried to cloak its losses in vague reports.

• noun

  The museum displayed a velvet cloak once worn at court.

• verb

  Dense fog began to cloak the entire valley by morning.

Where does cloak come from?

Language of origin: French

Cloak entered English in the 1200s from the Old French word cloke or cloque, a regional form meaning a horseman's heavy cape. That French word came in turn from the Medieval Latin clocca, which literally meant 'bell', and the garment earned the name because, when worn, its wide cape hung down in a rounded, bell-like shape. Remarkably, the very same clocca 'bell' is the source of the everyday word 'clock', so a cloak and a clock are distant linguistic cousins despite having nothing in common today. From the literal sense of a covering garment, English readily extended cloak to the figurative idea of anything that hides or disguises, as in cloaking one's true intentions. The spelling keeps the 'oa' vowel and the silent visual link to its bell-shaped origin rather than to the simpler 'clok'.

How the word is built

• cloak (from Medieval Latin clocca: bell, named for the bell-like shape of the garment)