Drake

How to spell drake

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drake

What does drake mean?

1. nounAn adult male duck.

Drake in a sentence

• The drake had bright green feathers on its head while the female stayed brown.

• On the farm pond one drake guarded a row of ducklings.

Where does drake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Drake is the ordinary English word for a male duck, and it surfaced in Middle English around the 1200s with origins reaching back into the Germanic languages. It is generally thought to be a shortening of a longer Germanic compound, seen in Old High German as antrahho, where the first part anut simply meant 'duck' and the second element is the part that survives in our 'drake'. Scholars suspect that second element once carried the sense of the male bird or even something like 'lord' of the brood, although the exact meaning is not fully certain. Close relatives turn up in Low German and other neighbouring tongues, which is why the word looks and sounds so plain and native rather than borrowed from Latin or French. Because it is short and phonetically regular, the spelling has stayed remarkably stable, and the silent final 'e' is the only feature a writer has to remember.

How the word is built

• drake (whole word; from a Germanic compound whose second element meant the male of the duck)