Milk

How to spell milk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce milk

What does milk mean?

1. nounThe white liquid produced by cows or other mammals, used as a drink and in cooking.
2. verbTo draw milk from a cow, goat, or other animal, or by extension to extract as much advantage as possible from something.

Milk in a sentence

• noun

  She added a splash of milk to her coffee.

• verb

  The farmer rises early to milk the cows before breakfast.

• noun

  The recipe calls for two cups of warm milk.

• verb

  Some firms try to milk every loophole in the tax rules.

Where does milk come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Milk is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English meoluc or milc, which named the white fluid that female mammals produce to feed their young. It belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close cousins in Dutch melk and German Milch, and reaches back to a Proto-Germanic form meluks. Scholars connect this in turn to an ancient Indo-European root that carried the sense of wiping, stroking, or pressing out, a fitting image for the action of drawing milk from an animal by hand. That same milking gesture also gave rise to the verb, so the noun and the action have travelled together for well over a thousand years. The spelling has stayed admirably simple and regular, which is why milk almost never trips up an adult writer.

How the word is built

• milk (from Old English meoluc/milc, a native Germanic root for the white fluid produced by mammals)