Rank

How to spell rank

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rank

What does rank mean?

1. nounA position within a hierarchy or ordered scale, especially of seniority or status.
2. verbTo assign a position in an ordered list, or to hold such a position.
3. adjectiveHaving a strong, unpleasant smell, or growing too thickly and coarsely.

Rank in a sentence

• noun

  She was promoted to the rank of sergeant after ten years.

• verb

  The judges will rank the entries from best to worst.

• adjective

  The bin gave off a rank smell after the heatwave.

• noun

  His salary rose with each rank he gained in the company.

• verb

  Economists rank the cities by cost of living.

• adjective

  Weeds grew rank across the neglected garden.

Where does rank come from?

Language of origin: French

The noun and verb 'rank' arrived in English in the 1500s from the Old French 'ranc' or 'renc', meaning a row or a line, which itself came from a Germanic source related to the idea of a ring or circle of people standing together. From the literal sense of soldiers standing in a line, the word grew to mean a grade or position in an ordered series, which is why we still speak of military ranks and of ranking things in order. The adjective 'rank', meaning foul-smelling or growing too thickly, has a completely separate history: it descends from the Old English 'ranc', which meant proud, full-grown, or overbearing, and it later soured into the modern sense of excessive and unpleasant. So two quite different words ended up spelled and sounded the same, one borrowed from French and one inherited from Anglo-Saxon. The shared four-letter spelling is simple and regular, which is why the word almost never trips up adult writers. Its close relative 'range' shares the same line-and-row idea from the French side of the family.

How the word is built

• Single root word: rank (a row or line), from Old French ranc; the unrelated adjective sense comes from Old English ranc 'proud, strong'