Hawk

How to spell hawk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hawk

What does hawk mean?

1. nounA medium-sized bird of prey with broad wings, keen eyesight, and hooked talons used to catch smaller animals.
2. verbTo sell goods, often aggressively or informally, by carrying them about or calling out to passers-by.
3. nounA person who favours aggressive or warlike policies, as opposed to a peace-seeking dove.

Hawk in a sentence

• noun

  A hawk circled high above the open field, watching for mice.

• verb

  Street traders hawk cheap umbrellas the moment it starts to rain.

• noun

  The defence minister was known as a hawk who pressed for military action.

• noun

  The falconer raised his arm and the hawk landed gently on his glove.

• verb

  Vendors outside the stadium hawk scarves and programmes to arriving fans.

• noun

  Every hawk in the cabinet argued for a tougher response to the crisis.

Where does hawk come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The bird sense descends from the Old English hafoc or heafoc, a word for a bird of prey that the Anglo-Saxons used for the trained falcons of the hunt. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close relatives in Old Norse haukr and German Habicht, all tracing back to a root meaning roughly 'to seize' or 'to grab', which fits a bird that snatches its prey in flight. Over the centuries the spelling drifted from hafoc through hauk to the modern hawk, with the silent ending settling on the simple -wk cluster. The unrelated verb meaning 'to peddle goods in the street' arrived much later, around the sixteenth century, as a back-formation from hawker, a pedlar's title borrowed from Low German and Dutch hoken 'to carry on the back'. A third use, the political 'hawk' who favours aggressive or warlike policy, is a much more recent figurative extension from the predatory bird, set against the peaceful 'dove'.

How the word is built

• hawk (from Old English hafoc: a bird of prey); the peddling verb is a back-formation from hawker