Tack

How to spell tack

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tack

What does tack mean?

1. nounA short, sharp nail or pin with a broad flat head, used to fasten material in place.
2. nounA particular course of action or way of approaching a problem.
3. verbTo change a sailing boat's direction by turning its bow through the wind.
4. nounThe saddle, bridle, and other equipment used when riding a horse.

Tack in a sentence

• noun

  She pinned the notice to the board with a single tack.

• noun

  After the first plan failed, the team tried a different tack.

• verb

  The skipper had to tack repeatedly to make headway against the breeze.

• noun

  She cleaned the saddle and stored the rest of the tack in the shed.

• noun

  He stepped on a tack that had fallen on the workshop floor.

• noun

  A gentler tack might persuade the client to stay.

Where does tack come from?

Language of origin: French

Tack came into English in the 1300s from Old North French taque or tache, words for a clasp, fastening, or small nail, and these in turn are thought to be of Germanic origin, sharing an ancestor with the idea of something that attaches or fixes one thing to another. The earliest English use was the literal one: a short, sharp nail with a broad flat head used to pin material in place. From that core notion of fastening grew the sewing sense, a loose temporary stitch that holds cloth before the real seam, and the sailing sense, where a tack was originally the rope or corner that secured the lower edge of a sail, then came to mean the zigzag course a boat steers into the wind. The familiar figurative phrase 'a different tack', meaning a fresh line of approach, sails straight out of that nautical use. Because the word stayed short and blunt across all these journeys, its spelling has remained refreshingly simple, the single trap being the silent doubling effect of the final 'ck'.

How the word is built

• tack (single root, from Old French tache: a fastening or small nail)