Rake

How to spell rake

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rake

What does rake mean?

1. nounA long-handled tool with a row of teeth or tines, used for gathering leaves or smoothing soil.
2. verbTo gather, scrape, or smooth something using a rake or a similar dragging motion.
3. nounA fashionable man who lives an immoral, irresponsible, pleasure-seeking life.

Rake in a sentence

• noun

  He leaned the rake against the shed after clearing the lawn.

• verb

  Every weekend in October he likes to rake the fallen leaves into neat piles.

• noun

  The novel's hero is a charming rake who gambles away his inheritance.

• noun

  A metal rake works better than a plastic one on wet gravel.

• verb

  The groundskeeper will rake the sand before the match begins.

• noun

  Society dismissed him as a rake who chased every fortune and flirtation.

Where does rake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The everyday garden sense comes straight from Old English, where the word raca or racu named a toothed implement used for gathering or scraping. It belongs to a wider Germanic family that also produced the Dutch raak and the German Rechen, all pointing back to an older root meaning 'to scrape together' or 'heap up'. The verb 'to rake' grew naturally from the noun, describing the action of dragging that toothed tool across ground. The quite different sense of a rake as an immoral, pleasure-seeking man is unrelated in origin; it is a shortening of the seventeenth century 'rakehell', a colourful term for a thoroughly worthless person, as if you had to rake through hell to find someone so depraved. Because all the modern senses settle on the same short, regular spelling, the word itself sets no real trap.

How the word is built

• rake (from Old English raca: a toothed garden implement)