Mack

How to spell mack

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mack

What does mack mean?

1. nounAn informal name for a waterproof raincoat.

Mack in a sentence

• She pulled on her mack before stepping out into the drizzle.

• A dripping mack hung on the hook by the back door.

Where does mack come from?

Language of origin: Other

The raincoat sense is a clipped, informal form of mackintosh, the waterproof garment named after Charles Macintosh, a Scottish chemist (1766 to 1843) who in 1823 patented a method of bonding two layers of cloth together with dissolved rubber to make them watertight. The garment took his name, but a spurious letter k crept into the spelling almost from the start, so the coat became the mackintosh even though the man himself wrote his name Macintosh; the short forms mac and mack inherited that wandering k. The verb sense, meaning to flirt with or court someone aggressively, comes from a quite separate route: American slang for a pimp, traceable to the French maquereau, which curiously meant both a pimp and the mackerel fish. From that street use of mack for a smooth, persuasive operator grew the looser modern sense of charming or chatting someone up. Because the common everyday spelling of the coat is simply mac, the extra k in mack is the detail most likely to trip a writer.

How the word is built

• mack (shortened from mackintosh, itself from the surname Macintosh, the inventor of the waterproof fabric)