Funk

How to spell funk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce funk

What does funk mean?

1. nounA style of dance music with a strong rhythmic groove, prominent bass and syncopation.
2. nounA state of low spirits, depression or sulking, often described as being in a funk.
3. nounA strong, stale, unpleasant smell.

Funk in a sentence

• The band fused jazz and funk into a single set.

• After losing the contract she sank into a deep funk for a week.

• The unwashed gym kit gave the locker room a powerful funk.

• The bass line gives the track its classic seventies funk.

• The gloomy weather left the whole office in a funk.

• An old basement funk hit them as they opened the cellar door.

Where does funk come from?

Language of origin: Other

The history of funk is tangled and only partly settled. The oldest sense in English, a state of cowering fear or panic, surfaced in the early 1700s, possibly out of the Flemish word fonck meaning 'agitation' or 'distress', and may have spread through Oxford university slang. A separate strand comes from a much older French dialect verb funkier, meaning 'to give off smoke' or 'to blow smoke', which in English came to mean a strong, stale, musty smell, the kind that hangs in an unaired room. From that smell sense, African American musicians of the mid twentieth century repurposed funky as praise for music that was earthy, raw and danceable, and by the 1950s and 1960s funk named a whole genre built on heavy bass and syncopated rhythm. Because all these meanings collapsed onto one short spelling, the word ended up doing the work of smell, mood and music at once, which is why the same four letters can describe a foul odour and a great groove.

How the word is built

• funk (single root, no prefix or suffix; an unanalysable monosyllable)