Puck

How to spell puck

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce puck

What does puck mean?

1. nounThe hard rubber disc struck by players in ice hockey.

Puck in a sentence

• The goalie blocked the puck with his glove.

• A frozen puck slides faster across the rink.

Where does puck come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word has two distinct strands behind it. The folklore sense traces back to the Old English 'pūca', a word for a malicious or mischievous goblin or demon, with close relatives across the old Germanic and Scandinavian languages, such as the Old Norse 'púki'; Shakespeare cemented the spelling and the playful image with the character Puck in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. The ice hockey sense is more recent and less certain, first recorded in the nineteenth century, and is widely thought to come from the Irish verb 'poc', meaning to poke, butt, or deliver a sharp blow, the same root that names the hurling stroke. The connection between a sharp poke and a small struck disc is easy to picture on the ice. Because the word is short and phonetically transparent, the spelling has stayed simple and stable. The rare trap is only that the single 'ck' ending must be remembered rather than a lone 'k'.

How the word is built

• puck (single root; the hockey disc sense possibly from Irish 'poc' meaning a poke or blow, the sprite sense from Old English 'pūca' meaning goblin)