Pluck

How to spell pluck

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pluck

What does pluck mean?

1. verbTo pull or pick something off quickly, such as fruit, feathers, or hairs.
2. nounSpirited courage and determination in the face of difficulty.

Pluck in a sentence

• verb

  She likes to pluck ripe tomatoes straight from the vine.

• noun

  It took real pluck for the young apprentice to challenge the senior manager.

• verb

  The cook will pluck the feathers from the chicken before roasting it.

• noun

  The rescue team showed great pluck during the storm.

Where does pluck come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Pluck comes from the Old English verb ploccian or pluccian, which meant 'to pull off, snatch, or pick'. It is a native Germanic word with close cousins in other languages of the family, including the Dutch plukken and the German pflücken, all carrying the same idea of pulling fruit, feathers, or hair away from something. The everyday sense of pulling strings, picking fruit, or stripping feathers from a bird has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years. The noun meaning 'courage or spirit' is much younger, emerging in the early 1800s: it originally referred to the heart, liver, and lungs pulled out of a slaughtered animal (the 'pluck'), and because the heart was treated as the seat of bravery, having 'pluck' came to mean having guts. The short, blunt spelling reflects its plain Anglo-Saxon origins, and the only mild trap is remembering the final 'ck' rather than a single 'k'.

How the word is built

• pluck (a single native root verb; no prefix or suffix, from Old English ploccian 'to pull off')