Neck

How to spell neck

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce neck

What does neck mean?

1. nounThe part of the body connecting the head to the shoulders and trunk.
2. nounA narrow connecting or projecting part of an object, such as a bottle or guitar.

Neck in a sentence

• Hours at the desk left a painful crick in his neck.

• He gripped the neck of the guitar to form the chord.

• She wrapped a thick scarf around her neck before the walk.

• A little wine had dried around the neck of the bottle.

Where does neck come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Neck descends from the Old English word hnecca, which referred specifically to the nape or back of the neck rather than the throat at the front. It belongs to a broad family of Germanic words, with close relatives in Old High German hnac and Old Norse hnakki, all pointing back to a root meaning something like 'nape' or 'projecting part'. Over time the English word widened to cover the whole part of the body joining the head to the trunk, and the front throat sense was largely absorbed too. The word also stretched by analogy to describe narrow connecting parts of objects, such as the neck of a bottle or a guitar, because they taper much as a neck does. The spelling is mercifully phonetic, with the silent 'h' of the old hnecca having dropped away long ago, leaving a short, blunt word that gives modern writers very little trouble.

How the word is built

• neck (from Old English hnecca: the nape or back of the neck), a single root word with no affixes