Steak

How to spell steak

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce steak

What does steak mean?

1. nounA thick slice of meat, especially beef, cut for grilling or frying.

Steak in a sentence

• He ordered a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare.

• The butcher trimmed the fat from each steak before wrapping it.

Where does steak come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Steak comes from the Old Norse word steik, meaning a slice of meat that was roasted or grilled, and it entered English in the 1400s through contact with Scandinavian settlers in northern Britain. The Norse word is related to steikja, 'to roast on a spit', which itself ties back to ideas of sticking or skewering meat over a fire. English kept the unusual 'ea' spelling even though the vowel is pronounced like 'ay', which is precisely why steak trips writers up: the letters look as if they should rhyme with 'beak' or 'leak'. The same odd pairing of spelling and sound appears in 'break' and 'great', the small family of 'ea' words that defy the usual rule. Because steak sounds exactly like 'stake', the post or the wager, the two are constantly muddled in writing despite their completely separate origins.

How the word is built

• steak (single root, from Old Norse steik: meat roasted on a spit); no affixes

Words that sound like steak

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

• stake: Money or another asset risked on an outcome, or a financial share or personal interest in something.