Rocks

How to spell rocks

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce rocks

What does rocks mean?

1. nounLarge pieces or masses of stone.
2. verbMoves gently or sharply back and forth.

Rocks in a sentence

• noun

  The climbers scrambled over the jagged rocks near the summit.

• verb

  The small boat rocks whenever a wave passes beneath it.

• noun

  Loose rocks tumbled onto the coastal road after the storm.

• verb

  She gently rocks the cradle until the baby falls asleep.

Where does rocks come from?

Language of origin: French

This word carries two distinct stories under one spelling. The noun 'rock', meaning a mass of stone, came into English in the 1300s from Old French 'roche' and 'rocque', which trace back to the Medieval Latin 'rocca', a word for a crag or boulder whose ultimate source is genuinely uncertain. The verb 'rock', meaning to sway gently back and forth, is older and native: it descends from the Old English 'roccian', a Germanic word linked to the idea of moving a cradle. Over the centuries the two merged into a single tidy four-letter shape, and the plural and third-person form simply adds '-s'. The spelling stays comfortably regular because the hard 'ck' faithfully signals the short vowel, so the only choice a writer makes is the unremarkable plural ending.

How the word is built

• rock (stone; or to sway)
• -s (plural noun / third-person singular verb)