Docks

How to spell docks

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce docks

What does docks mean?

1. nounThe enclosed areas of water and the surrounding wharves where ships are loaded, unloaded, or repaired.
2. verbThird-person singular present of dock: to bring or come into a berth, to join two craft together, or to deduct an amount.

Docks in a sentence

• noun

  The cargo was held at the docks until the paperwork cleared.

• verb

  The ferry docks on the south side of the harbour every evening.

• noun

  Her grandfather worked at the docks unloading timber for forty years.

• verb

  The supply capsule docks with the space station tomorrow.

Where does docks come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The core word 'dock' arrived in English in the late fifteenth century, most likely from Middle Dutch 'docke', a word for the channel or hollow in which a ship sits at low tide. Dutch and Flemish sailors dominated North Sea trade at the time, so a great deal of harbour vocabulary crossed into English from the Low Countries, and 'dock' was among them. The ultimate source is uncertain, but many scholars trace it back to a late Latin or Romance word meaning a watercourse or conduit. Over time the sense broadened from the muddy berth itself to the built-up wharves and basins of a port, giving the familiar plural 'the docks'. A quite separate strand gives the verb 'to dock' meaning to cut short, as in docking a horse's tail, which comes from a Germanic root for a stumpy or cut-off thing; that sense later produced the modern idea of docking someone's wages.

How the word is built

• dock (a berth or enclosed water for ships)
• -s (plural/third-person marker)