Monk

How to spell monk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce monk

What does monk mean?

1. nounA man who belongs to a religious community and lives under vows, usually in a monastery.

Monk in a sentence

• The elderly monk spent his mornings copying manuscripts in the abbey.

• Each monk in the order rose before dawn to pray.

Where does monk come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Old English munuc, which described a man who lived a solitary or withdrawn religious life. That term was borrowed from the Late Latin monachus, which in turn came from the Greek monakhos, meaning 'solitary' or 'living alone', built on the root monos, the plain Greek word for 'alone' or 'single'. The idea was that the earliest monks were hermits who withdrew from society to pursue a religious life by themselves, even before organised monasteries existed. The same Greek root monos survives in many familiar English words such as 'monopoly' and 'monotone', all carrying that sense of 'one' or 'single'. The spelling settled with a silent-feeling 'k' that simply marks the hard ending sound, while the 'o' is pronounced like the 'u' in 'sun', which is the small trap when writing it from memory.

How the word is built

• monk (from Old English munuc, ultimately Greek monos 'alone')