Drinks

How to spell drinks

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce drinks

What does drinks mean?

1. nounQuantities of liquid prepared or served for swallowing, especially beverages.
2. verbTakes liquid into the mouth and swallows it, said of a third person.

Drinks in a sentence

• noun

  The waiter brought our drinks to the table before the meal arrived.

• verb

  She drinks a glass of water every morning before work.

• noun

  Cold drinks were selling fast on the hot afternoon.

• verb

  The dog drinks from its bowl whenever it comes inside.

Where does drinks come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word goes back to the Old English verb drincan, which simply meant to take in liquid by swallowing, and it belongs to the oldest layer of native English vocabulary. It has close cousins across the Germanic family, including the Dutch drinken and the German trinken, all descended from a shared Proto-Germanic root that carried the same everyday meaning. The noun use, a thing one drinks, grew naturally out of the verb and was firmly established by the medieval period. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable: the -nk- cluster you hear is written exactly as it sounds, so the only point to watch is the plain -s ending added to the base word drink. Because the word is so old and so common, its form has never needed reshaping from French or Latin, which is why it looks as direct as it does.

How the word is built

• drink (Old English drincan: to swallow liquid)
• -s (plural noun / third-person verb ending)