Sink

How to spell sink

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sink

What does sink mean?

1. verbTo go down below the surface of a liquid, or to cause something to do so.
2. nounA fixed basin with a water supply and a drain, used for washing.

Sink in a sentence

• verb

  Heavy rocks sink quickly to the bottom of the pond.

• noun

  She left the dirty dishes piled high in the kitchen sink.

• verb

  The captain feared the damaged hull would sink before dawn.

• noun

  The plumber replaced the cracked pipe under the bathroom sink.

Where does sink come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Sink comes from the Old English verb sincan, meaning 'to become submerged' or 'to go down beneath a surface', which was part of a wide family of related Germanic verbs, including Old Norse sokkva and German sinken. The original sense was firmly about descending into water or soft ground, and from there it broadened to cover any gradual lowering, whether of the sun on the horizon, of prices, or of a person's spirits. The noun sense, a basin fitted with a drain, is much younger and grew out of the verb: a sink was literally the place where waste water 'sank' away and drained off. Because the word follows a strong-verb pattern, its past tense alternates between 'sank' and 'sunk', a survival of the old Germanic vowel changes. The spelling stays usefully simple, with the tricky part being only the 'nk' cluster that sounds like 'ngk' but is written without a 'g'.

How the word is built

• sink (from Old English sincan: to become submerged, to go down)

Words that sound like sink

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• sync: To make two or more things operate in step, or to copy data so devices match.