Deck

How to spell deck

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce deck

What does deck mean?

1. nounA flat raised platform or floor, especially on a ship or attached to a house.
2. nounA complete set of playing cards.
3. verbTo decorate or dress up something, often grandly.
4. verbTo knock someone to the ground with a punch.

Deck in a sentence

• noun

  The passengers gathered on the upper deck to watch the harbour.

• noun

  He shuffled the deck before dealing the next hand.

• verb

  Every December they deck the hall with lights and ribbons.

• verb

  One wild swing was enough to deck the larger man.

• noun

  They built a wooden deck off the back of the kitchen for summer dining.

• noun

  A standard deck contains fifty-two cards in four suits.

Where does deck come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

Deck comes from the Middle Dutch word dec or decke, which literally meant a covering or roof, and is closely related to the verb decken, meaning 'to cover'. English sailors borrowed it in the fifteenth century, originally for the canvas or planking that covered and roofed over part of a ship, before it came to mean the solid horizontal floors of a vessel. The same Germanic root that gave Dutch its 'covering' word also lies behind the English 'thatch', since both ultimately trace to an ancient root meaning 'to cover'. Over time the maritime sense spread outward to other flat raised platforms, such as a wooden deck attached to a house and the deck of a bus. The 'pack of cards' meaning grew separately in the sixteenth century, probably from the idea of cards stacked in a covering pile, and the slang verb 'to deck' someone, meaning to knock them flat onto the floor, is a much later and more colourful offshoot.

How the word is built

• deck (from Middle Dutch dec/decke: a covering or roof); a single unanalysable root with no prefix or suffix