Quack

How to spell quack

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce quack

What does quack mean?

1. verbTo make the harsh cry characteristic of a duck.
2. nounA person who fraudulently claims medical knowledge or skill.

Quack in a sentence

• verb

  The ducks on the pond began to quack the moment the children arrived.

• noun

  The so-called clinic was run by a quack who sold useless herbal cures.

• verb

  Toy ducks that quack when squeezed are popular at bath time.

• noun

  Regulators shut down the practice after exposing the doctor as a quack.

Where does quack come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

The duck-noise sense of quack is purely imitative, an echoic word coined to mimic the harsh call a duck makes, and it appears in English from the 1600s alongside similar sounds in Dutch (kwaken) and German (quaken). The very different sense of a fraudulent doctor has a separate and rather colourful history: it is a clipped form of the older English word 'quacksalver', borrowed in the 1500s from the Dutch 'kwakzalver'. That Dutch word combined 'kwakken', meaning to chatter, boast or hawk loudly, with 'zalf', meaning salve or ointment, so a quacksalver was literally someone who loudly boasts about the healing ointments he peddles. Over time English shortened quacksalver to plain quack, and the two senses happened to converge on the same spelling, since the boastful chatter of the fake healer sounded much like noisy quacking. The doubled letters 'ck' simply follow the normal English pattern for a short vowel ending in a /k/ sound, as in 'back' or 'duck'.

How the word is built

• quack (imitative root mimicking a duck's call); the 'charlatan' sense is a shortening of the older 'quacksalver'