Junk

How to spell junk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce junk

What does junk mean?

1. nounOld or discarded items regarded as worthless; rubbish or clutter.
2. verbTo throw away or discard something as worthless.
3. nounA flat-bottomed sailing ship traditionally used in Chinese and Southeast Asian waters.

Junk in a sentence

• noun

  The garage was so full of junk that the car no longer fit inside.

• verb

  The company decided to junk the outdated software entirely.

• noun

  A wooden junk with battened sails glided across the harbour.

• noun

  She cleared a decade of junk from the loft before the move.

• verb

  He wanted to junk the broken printer rather than repair it.

• noun

  Tourists in Hong Kong often book an evening cruise aboard a restored junk.

Where does junk come from?

Language of origin: Other

The 'rubbish' sense of junk first appears in Middle English around the 1400s as 'junk' or 'jonke', a sailor's word for old or worn-out rope and cable that was no longer fit for rigging. Such cordage was not simply thrown away; it was unpicked and reused for caulking and oakum, so 'junk' came to mean any odds and ends of little present value. From this practical seafaring origin the meaning broadened by the 1800s to cover worthless objects, cheap goods, and rubbish in general, and later still it attached itself to things like junk food and junk mail. The flat-bottomed Asian sailing ship called a 'junk' is an entirely separate word, borrowed in the 1500s from Portuguese 'junco', which in turn came from Malay 'jong' meaning a large seagoing vessel. Because both words ended up spelled the same way, English now carries two unrelated 'junks', though it is the rope-derived rubbish sense that dominates everyday use.

How the word is built

• junk (single root, no prefix or suffix); the rubbish sense derives from a nautical word for worn-out rope