Nuke

How to spell nuke

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce nuke

What does nuke mean?

1. verbTo attack or destroy a target with nuclear weapons.
2. nounAn informal term for a nuclear weapon or bomb.
3. verbTo heat or cook food rapidly in a microwave oven (informal).

Nuke in a sentence

• verb

  The film imagines what would happen if a hostile power tried to nuke a major city.

• noun

  The documentary traced how many a nuke could be stored in a single silo.

• verb

  He likes to nuke last night's leftovers for a quick lunch.

• verb

  Strategists argued for decades over whether any nation would ever actually nuke another.

• noun

  Campaigners marched for years demanding that every nuke be dismantled.

• verb

  Just nuke the soup for two minutes and stir it halfway through.

Where does nuke come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Nuke is a twentieth-century slang clipping of 'nuclear', which itself traces back to the Latin nucleus, meaning a 'kernel' or 'little nut', a diminutive of nux, the Latin word for 'nut'. Scientists adopted nucleus to describe the dense core at the centre of an atom or a cell, picturing it as the small kernel inside a larger shell. When atomic weapons emerged in the 1940s, 'nuclear' became the defining adjective of the era, and by the late 1950s and 1960s English speakers had shortened it informally to 'nuke', first as military and protest slang. The word later broadened humorously to mean 'to cook in a microwave oven', since both involve invisible radiation. The plain four-letter spelling hides the Latin nut at its root, and the silent-feeling 'e' simply keeps the long 'u' sound intact.

How the word is built

• nuke (clipped slang form of 'nuclear', from Latin nucleus 'kernel')