Desk

How to spell desk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce desk

What does desk mean?

1. nounA piece of furniture with a flat surface, used for writing, reading, or working at a computer.
2. nounA section of an organisation responsible for a particular task, often named after the counter where staff work.

Desk in a sentence

• She cleared the paperwork off her desk before lunch.

• Please report any lost luggage to the information desk.

• The new office gave each employee a standing desk.

• The newspaper assigned the story to its foreign desk.

Where does desk come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word desk arrived in English during the late 1300s, ultimately from the Latin discus, meaning a flat plate, a dish, or a quoit. That same Latin discus is the shared ancestor of several familiar English words, including dish, disc, and the borrowed dais on which a speaker stands. The path into English most likely ran through Medieval Latin desca, a flat table used for reading or writing, and the word kept that sense of a sloping board or table for working at books. Because the term has been settled in English for so long and the spelling stayed short and phonetic, it never picked up the silent letters or doubled consonants that trip writers up. The link back to discus is a neat reminder that a desk was originally just a flat surface, like a dish laid out before you.

How the word is built

• desk (a flat-topped working table); a single unanalysable root word with no prefix or suffix