Hank

How to spell hank

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hank

What does hank mean?

1. nounA looped coil or skein of yarn, wool, thread, or rope.

Hank in a sentence

• She pulled a hank of wool from the basket and began to wind it into a ball.

• The chandler sold each hank of rope by length and thickness.

Where does hank come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The word hank comes from the Old Norse hǫnk, meaning a coil, loop, or skein, and it slipped into northern English speech during the period of Scandinavian settlement before being written down in Middle English around the 1300s. The original sense was very concrete: a length of thread, wool, or rope wound round on itself into a manageable loop, and that meaning has stayed remarkably stable down the centuries. In the textile trade a hank became a fixed measured length of yarn, so the word carried a technical weight in spinning and weaving for generations. Sailors borrowed it too, using hank for a ring or loop that fastens a sail to a stay. Because it is a short, blunt word of Norse stock rather than a polished Latin import, its spelling stayed simple and phonetic, which is exactly why it rarely trips writers up.

How the word is built

• hank (from Old Norse hǫnk: a coil or skein), single root, no affixes