Duck

How to spell duck

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce duck

What does duck mean?

1. nounA common waterbird with a broad flat bill, short legs, and webbed feet.
2. verbTo lower the head or body quickly to avoid being hit or seen.

Duck in a sentence

• noun

  A duck paddled slowly across the village pond.

• verb

  He had to duck under the low beam in the old cottage.

• noun

  The children threw stale bread to the duck near the river.

• verb

  She tried to duck out of the meeting by leaving early.

Where does duck come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The bird name duck comes from Old English duce, which is believed to derive from the verb ducan, meaning 'to dive' or 'to plunge under water'. In other words, the bird was literally named for what it does: a diver, the creature that ducks beneath the surface. This makes the noun and the verb two faces of the same ancient word, since the action of bobbing the head down to avoid something grew directly out of that same diving sense. The spelling settled into its short, blunt modern form by the Middle English period, and the related Dutch word duiken, 'to dive', shows the same Germanic family at work. The heavy cotton fabric called duck is a separate borrowing, taken from the Dutch doek meaning 'cloth', so the cloth sense only sounds the same by coincidence.

How the word is built

• duck (single Old English root; no prefix or suffix)