Silk

How to spell silk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce silk

What does silk mean?

1. nounA fine, soft, lustrous fibre produced by silkworms, or the smooth fabric woven from it.

Silk in a sentence

• The blouse was made of pure silk and felt cool against the skin.

• She packed a scarf of patterned silk for the trip.

Where does silk come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Silk comes from the Old English seolc or sioloc, which named the soft thread spun by the silkworm and the cloth woven from it. The Old English form is thought to derive ultimately from a Latin and Greek word, sericum, meaning 'Seric cloth', from Seres, the ancient name for the people of eastern Asia who first produced silk. Interestingly, many other European languages picked up the same idea using an l-less form (French soie, Latin sericum), while English and the Baltic and Slavic languages adopted a form with an l, suggesting the word reached northern Europe along a different trade route. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years, with the simple four-letter shape surviving from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. Because the consonant cluster -lk is written exactly as it sounds, the word holds few traps for the modern writer.

How the word is built

• silk (single Old English root; no prefix or suffix)