Dunk

How to spell dunk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dunk

What does dunk mean?

1. verbTo dip food briefly into a liquid such as tea, coffee, or soup before eating it.
2. nounA scoring shot in basketball made by thrusting the ball directly down through the hoop.

Dunk in a sentence

• verb

  He likes to dunk a biscuit in his morning tea.

• noun

  The crowd roared after his powerful dunk near the buzzer.

• verb

  Children love to dunk chunks of bread into the warm soup.

• noun

  A clean dunk requires both height and timing.

Where does dunk come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Dunk arrived in American English in the early twentieth century from Pennsylvania German dunke, meaning 'to dip' or 'to soak', a word carried to North America by German-speaking settlers. That dialect form traces back to Old High German dunkon, also 'to dip', and it shares an ancestor with the modern German verb tunken, which still means to dip food into a liquid. The original everyday picture was wholesome and domestic: dipping bread or cake into coffee, milk, or soup. From that literal dipping sense, twentieth-century American sport borrowed the word for thrusting a basketball down through the hoop, as if dunking it into the net. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, with the only mild quirk being that the 'n' before 'k' is pronounced as the 'ng' sound, so the word sounds like 'dungk'.

How the word is built

• dunk (single root, from Pennsylvania German dunke 'to dip')