Rink

How to spell rink

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rink

What does rink mean?

1. nounAn enclosed area of ice or smooth flooring used for skating, hockey, or curling.

Rink in a sentence

• The children spent the afternoon skating at the local ice rink.

• The hockey team practises at the same rink every weekend.

Where does rink come from?

Language of origin: French

Rink first appears in the Scots dialect of the 1300s, where it meant a marked-out course or stretch of ground, especially the area where the game of curling was played on ice. The most widely accepted account traces it back to Old French renc or renk, meaning a 'row' or 'rank' of people, the same source that gives English the word 'rank'. From the idea of a laid-out course, the word came to mean the sheet of ice set aside for curling, and by the 1800s it had broadened to any prepared surface for skating, whether natural ice or, later, an artificial one. The leap to roller skating arrived in the late nineteenth century as that pastime spread. The spelling has stayed short and phonetic, which is why it rarely trips writers up; the only quirk is that the spoken 'ng' sound is written simply as 'n' before the 'k'.

How the word is built

• rink (single root, no affixes; Scots word for a marked stretch of ice or a course)