Plaque

How to spell plaque

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce plaque

What does plaque mean?

1. nounA flat plate of metal, stone, or wood fixed to a surface and bearing an inscription, often to commemorate a person or event.
2. nounA soft, sticky film or deposit that builds up, such as the bacterial layer on teeth or the fatty material lining an artery.

Plaque in a sentence

• A bronze plaque on the wall named every donor to the hospital wing.

• The dentist warned that plaque left along the gum line hardens into tartar.

• The council unveiled a blue plaque marking the house where the writer once lived.

• Daily flossing helps remove the plaque that brushing alone leaves behind.

Where does plaque come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English in the early 1800s directly from French, where plaque meant a flat plate, slab, or tablet. The French word was borrowed in turn from Dutch plak, meaning a flat board or a thin slice, which is connected to the Dutch verb plakken, 'to stick or paste'. The idea running through all of these is something flat that is fixed or stuck onto a surface, which fits both a metal sign bolted to a wall and the sticky film that clings to teeth. The medical sense, the soft deposit on teeth and later the fatty build-up inside arteries, grew out of the same notion of a thin layer adhering to a surface and became common in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The biggest spelling trap is the French ending: the word keeps its original -que rather than being respelled with a -ck, which is why writers who trust the sound often reach for the wrong ending.

How the word is built

• plaque (whole word, from French plaque: a flat plate or tablet); no separable prefix or suffix