Stake

How to spell stake

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stake

What does stake mean?

1. nounMoney or another asset risked on an outcome, or a financial share or personal interest in something.
2. nounA pointed wooden or metal post driven into the ground to support, mark, or secure something.
3. verbTo risk or wager something on an outcome, or to mark out an area with posts.

Stake in a sentence

• noun

  The investor holds a forty percent stake in the company.

• noun

  He drove a wooden stake into the soil to support the young tree.

• verb

  She would stake her entire savings on the new venture.

• noun

  Players raised the stake with every round of betting.

• noun

  Each tomato plant was tied to a tall bamboo stake.

• verb

  They plan to stake out the garden plot before planting.

Where does stake come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English staca, which meant a pointed stick or post driven into the ground, and it traces back to a Germanic root shared with words like 'stick' and 'stake' across the Low Countries. The earliest sense was thoroughly physical: a sharpened pole used to mark a boundary, support a plant, or tether an animal. From the grim medieval practice of binding condemned people to such a post came the phrase 'burned at the stake', which kept the literal meaning alive. The gambling sense, money placed on a post or table as a wager, grew up in the 1500s, possibly from the idea of money set down at a fixed point, and from there came the modern figurative 'having a stake' in something, meaning a share or interest. The spelling trap is purely the homophone 'steak', the cut of meat, which sounds identical but comes from a completely separate Old Norse word; 'stake' keeps the plain k spelling while the food word hides an a after the e.

How the word is built

• stake (a single root from Old English staca, meaning a pointed post); no prefix or suffix

Words that sound like stake

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

• steak: A thick slice of meat, especially beef, cut for grilling or frying.