Drank

How to spell drank

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drank

What does drank mean?

1. verbThe simple past tense of 'drink': swallowed a liquid at some point in the past.

Drank in a sentence

• She drank two glasses of water after the run.

• He drank his coffee quickly before the meeting started.

Where does drank come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the simple past tense of 'drink', which comes from the Old English verb 'drincan', meaning 'to swallow liquid'. The verb belonged to a class of strong Germanic verbs that mark their tenses not with an added ending but with a change in the internal vowel, a pattern called ablaut; the same system gives us 'sing, sang, sung' and 'ring, rang, rung'. So the present 'drink', the past 'drank', and the past participle 'drunk' are three faces of one ancient verb, with the vowels i, a, and u marking the shift in time. The root traces back to a Proto-Germanic form 'drinkan', and close cousins survive in German 'trinken' and Dutch 'drinken'. Because the past tense is built by changing the vowel rather than adding a suffix, the spelling stays short and regular; the only trap is choosing 'drank' for the simple past and reserving 'drunk' for use with 'have' or 'had'.

How the word is built

• Past tense of 'drink', formed by an ancient vowel change (ablaut): drink (present) becomes drank (past); root from Old English drincan