Flock

How to spell flock

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce flock

What does flock mean?

1. nounA group of birds or sheep that feed, travel, or are kept together.
2. verbTo gather or move together in large numbers.
3. nounSoft tufts of wool or fibre used to stuff cushions or to coat patterned wallpaper.

Flock in a sentence

• noun

  The shepherd counted the sheep in the flock before locking the gate.

• verb

  Shoppers will flock to the store during the holiday sales.

• noun

  The old sofa was stuffed with flock that had clumped over the years.

• noun

  A flock of starlings wheeled over the rooftops at dusk.

• verb

  Tourists flock to the coast whenever the weather turns warm.

• noun

  The dining room had a deep red flock wallpaper with a raised velvet pattern.

Where does flock come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Flock comes straight from the Old English word flocc, which meant a crowd, troop, or band of people, and it is one of the older words in the everyday English stock. In its earliest use it referred to gatherings of humans rather than animals, but by the medieval period it had attached itself firmly to herds of sheep and flights of birds, the sense most people reach for today. The word has Germanic roots and is related to similar northern European forms, though scholars are not entirely certain how it connects to the Old Norse flokkr, meaning a company or band. A separate noun spelled the same way, meaning a tuft of wool or the soft stuffing in upholstery, has a different source in the Latin floccus, a tuft of wool, and the two have simply collided into one spelling over the centuries. Because the word is short, native, and phonetically regular, the spelling has barely changed and gives modern writers almost no trouble.

How the word is built

• flock (single root, Old English flocc: a group, crowd, or band)