Sunk

How to spell sunk

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sunk

What does sunk mean?

1. verbPast participle of sink: gone beneath the surface of a liquid, or dropped to a lower level.
2. adjectiveAlready spent and unrecoverable, as in a sunk cost that cannot be regained.

Sunk in a sentence

• verb

  The old fishing boat had sunk before the rescue crew arrived.

• adjective

  The deposit is a sunk cost, so it should not influence the new decision.

• verb

  By midday the river level had sunk to its lowest point in years.

• adjective

  The accountant warned the team to ignore sunk costs when planning the budget.

Where does sunk come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past participle (and an older past tense) of the verb 'sink', which descends from the Old English strong verb 'sincan', meaning to become submerged or to fall to the bottom. It belongs to a family of related Germanic verbs, including Old Norse 'sokkva' and German 'sinken', all carrying the same idea of sliding downward into water or earth. As a strong verb, 'sink' changes its vowel rather than adding '-ed', giving the historical pattern sink, sank, sunk, much like ring, rang, rung. For centuries 'sunk' competed with 'sunken' as the participle, and 'sunken' survives mainly as a fixed adjective (sunken eyes, a sunken garden), while 'sunk' became the plain participle used after 'has' or 'had'. The short, blunt spelling rarely trips writers, since it reflects the sound directly with no silent letters.

How the word is built

• sunk (strong past participle of sink, from Old English suncen)