Flex

How to spell flex

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flex

What does flex mean?

1. verbTo bend a joint or tighten a muscle so that it tenses or bulges.
2. nounA length of insulated, bendable electrical cable used to connect an appliance to the mains.
3. verbTo show off or flaunt money, possessions, or achievements (informal).

Flex in a sentence

• verb

  The physiotherapist asked him to flex his knee slowly.

• noun

  The lamp stopped working because the flex had frayed near the plug.

• verb

  He likes to flex his new car in front of the neighbours.

• verb

  She would flex her fingers before every long typing session.

• noun

  He coiled the flex neatly before storing the iron in the cupboard.

• verb

  They tend to flex their holiday photos across social media.

Where does flex come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word traces back to the Latin verb flectere, which meant simply 'to bend' or 'to curve', and to its past participle flexus, 'bent'. That same Latin root sits inside a whole family of English borrowings, including 'flexible', 'reflect' (to bend back), and 'inflection' (a bending of the voice). English took 'flex' as a verb in the late 1500s, meaning to bend a joint or tighten a muscle so that it bulges. Later the noun developed several practical uses: in British English it came to name an insulated electrical cable, presumably because such a cord bends and coils easily. More recently an informal sense, to show off or flaunt something, grew out of the image of a person flexing their muscles to display them. Because the word is short and spelled exactly as it sounds, its spelling rarely causes trouble.

How the word is built

• flex (from Latin flexus, the past participle of flectere: to bend); the modern word keeps the bare root with no prefix or suffix