Shack

How to spell shack

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shack

What does shack mean?

1. nounA small, roughly built hut or cabin, often made of cheap or salvaged materials.
2. verbTo live in or occupy a place, especially informally with another person (usually as 'shack up').

Shack in a sentence

• noun

  The fishermen stored their nets in a wooden shack by the harbour.

• verb

  The couple decided to shack up together before signing a longer lease.

• noun

  They spent the summer in a tiny shack with no electricity or running water.

• verb

  After the divorce he chose to shack up in a friend's spare room for a while.

Where does shack come from?

Language of origin: Spanish

The origin of shack is genuinely uncertain, which is why it carries no neat root chain. The leading idea is that it entered American English in the nineteenth century as a clipped, anglicised form of the Mexican Spanish word jacal, meaning a rough hut made of mud and sticks, which itself goes back to the Nahuatl xacalli, 'hut'. A competing theory ties it to the English dialect verb 'to shack', meaning to wander or live roughly, perhaps related to 'shake'. From the 1870s onward shack settled firmly into the sense of a small, crudely built cabin or shanty, and it later spawned the casual verb 'to shack up', meaning to live with someone. Because the spelling is short and phonetic, the only thing to remember is the doubled 'ck' that closes a short vowel, exactly as in 'back' and 'track'.

How the word is built

• shack (one-syllable root noun; origin uncertain, possibly from Spanish jacal via dialect)