Punk

How to spell punk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce punk

What does punk mean?

1. nounA loud, fast, deliberately raw style of rock music, or the rebellious youth subculture associated with it.
2. nounA worthless or contemptible young person, especially a petty hooligan.

Punk in a sentence

• The band played fast, angry punk all night.

• The shop owner called the thief a worthless little punk.

• She discovered punk as a teenager and never looked back.

• Some punk had keyed every car on the street.

Where does punk come from?

Language of origin: Other

Punk is a word whose roots are tangled and not fully settled, which is why its history is best told with some caution. In the 1600s it appears in English meaning a prostitute, a sense now long obsolete, and the trail before that grows faint. By the 1700s it had shifted to mean dry, rotted wood, the kind that smoulders well and was used as tinder or as a slow fuse for lighting fireworks; this sense may connect to an Algonquian word along the lines of 'ponk' for ashes or dust, borrowed in colonial North America. From the idea of something punky and worthless grew the American slang for a worthless young hoodlum or a contemptible person, common by the early twentieth century. In the 1970s music writers seized on that tough, throwaway flavour to christen 'punk rock', a raw, deliberately unpolished style, and the youth subculture around it. The spelling has stayed reassuringly simple throughout, a plain four letters that mirror its blunt sound.

How the word is built

• punk (single root, no productive affixes)