Sucker

How to spell sucker

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce sucker

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does sucker mean?

1. nounA person who is easily deceived, cheated, or persuaded.
2. nounA hard sweet on a stick that is held in the mouth; a lollipop.
3. nounA shoot growing from the base or roots of a plant that draws nourishment from it.
4. nounA disc-shaped organ or device that grips a surface by suction.

Sucker in a sentence

• The salesman treated every walk-in customer like a sucker.

• The bank teller handed each child a cherry sucker at the counter.

• Prune every sucker at the base of the rose to keep the plant strong.

• Each sucker on the octopus arm clamped firmly onto the glass tank.

• Only a sucker would hand over a deposit before seeing the contract.

• She unwrapped a grape sucker and tucked the stick behind her teeth.

Where does sucker come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word grows directly out of the verb 'suck', which descends from the Old English sucan, meaning to draw liquid into the mouth by creating a pull with the lips and tongue. This in turn comes from a Germanic root shared with similar words across the older Northern languages, and ultimately echoes an imitative sound for the action of sucking. Adding the agent suffix '-er' produced a noun for one who or that which sucks, applied early on to a young animal still nursing, such as a suckling pig or calf. From there the meaning branched out in colourful ways: a botanical 'sucker' is a shoot drawing nourishment from the parent plant, the disc-like organ that an octopus uses to grip is a 'sucker', and a person easily duped is a 'sucker' because the slang pictured them as a gullible creature ready to swallow anything. In American usage it also came to mean a flat sweet held in the mouth, the lollipop. The spelling stays refreshingly regular, with the hard 'ck' simply marking the short vowel before the '-er' ending.

How the word is built

• suck (from Old English sucan: to draw in with the mouth)
• -er (agent or instrument suffix)