Rock

How to spell rock

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rock

What does rock mean?

1. nounA large mass of stone, or the hard mineral material the earth is made of.
2. verbTo move or sway gently back and forth.
3. nounA style of popular music with a strong beat, usually built around electric guitars and drums.

Rock in a sentence

• noun

  The climbers anchored their ropes to a solid rock near the summit.

• verb

  She would rock the cradle softly until the baby fell asleep.

• noun

  The band started out playing rock in small clubs before signing a record deal.

• noun

  The road crew had to drill through layers of rock to lay the pipe.

• verb

  Strong waves began to rock the small fishing boat.

• noun

  Classic rock dominated the radio station's evening playlist.

Where does rock come from?

Language of origin: French

The mineral sense of rock comes into English from Old French roche or roque, meaning a large stone or boulder, which in turn descends from the Medieval Latin rocca of uncertain pre-Latin origin. It settled into English during the medieval period as the ordinary word for stone in the mass, and for an individual large stone or crag. The verb meaning to sway back and forth has a completely separate history: it derives from the Old English roccian, a native Germanic word meaning to move a child gently to and fro, as in a cradle. Centuries later these two strands fed the twentieth century musical sense, since rock and roll first described the rolling, swaying motion suggested by the verb before it named the music. Because the word is short and phonetically transparent, the spelling almost never causes trouble.

How the word is built

• rock (a single root word; no prefix or suffix)