Sank

How to spell sank

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sank

What does sank mean?

1. verbPast tense of sink: descended below the surface of a liquid, or dropped downward.

Sank in a sentence

• The old ferry sank within minutes of striking the rocks.

• She sank into the armchair after a long shift at work.

Where does sank come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Sank is the past tense of the verb sink, which comes from the Old English sincan, meaning 'to become submerged' or 'to fall to the bottom'. It belongs to the old class of strong Germanic verbs that mark their tenses by changing the inner vowel rather than adding an ending, a pattern called ablaut; the same mechanism gives us sing, sang, sung and ring, rang, rung. So the present sink shifts its vowel to sank for the simple past and to sunk for the past participle, exactly as those rhyming verbs do. The root traces back to a shared Germanic ancestor and has close cousins in Dutch zinken and German sinken, both still meaning 'to sink'. Because the spelling simply follows the sing or sang model, the only real trap is choosing sank over sunk, a grammar point rather than a misspelling.

How the word is built

• sank (strong-verb past tense of sink; vowel change i to a marks the past)