Cork

How to spell cork

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cork

What does cork mean?

1. nounThe light, springy bark of the cork oak, or a stopper cut from it to seal a bottle.
2. verbTo close or seal a bottle or container with a stopper.

Cork in a sentence

• noun

  The cork shot out of the champagne bottle and hit the ceiling.

• verb

  Remember to cork the bottle tightly before storing it on its side.

• noun

  The noticeboard was made of cork so that pins pushed in easily.

• verb

  The winery will cork each bottle by machine on the production line.

Where does cork come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

Cork traces back to the Latin word cortex, meaning the bark of a tree, the rugged outer layer that protects the trunk. The cork oak of the western Mediterranean produces an unusually thick, springy bark, and the Romans already used it for floats and stoppers. The word reached English in the 1300s, most likely through Spanish, where forms such as corcho and alcorque (a cork-soled shoe, itself borrowed from Arabic al-qurq) carried the same idea. Over time the term narrowed from the bark in general to the familiar bottle stopper cut from that bark. The same cortex root survives in English words like cortex (the brain's outer layer) and cortical, a reminder that cork is fundamentally just specialised bark.

How the word is built

• cork (single root from Latin cortex: bark of a tree); no prefix or suffix