Oaks

How to spell oaks

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce oaks

What does oaks mean?

1. nounMore than one oak, the large hardwood trees that produce acorns.

Oaks in a sentence

• Ancient oaks lined the long driveway to the manor house.

• The council planted a row of young oaks along the new road.

Where does oaks come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is simply the plural of 'oak', which descends from the Old English ac, the native Anglo-Saxon name for the sturdy hardwood tree. Related forms appear right across the Germanic languages, such as the Dutch eik and the German Eiche, all pointing back to a shared ancestor that named this same broad family of trees. The spelling trap lives entirely in the vowel: the long 'oh' sound is written with the digraph 'oa', a pattern English also uses in 'boat' and 'soap', rather than a single 'o'. The tree has long carried connotations of strength and endurance, which is why its timber was prized for shipbuilding and why oak figures in so many English place names. Adding the plural is straightforward, since the word ends in a hard consonant and simply takes a final '-s'.

How the word is built

• oak (from Old English ac, a hardwood tree)
• -s (plural suffix)