Trunks

How to spell trunks

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce trunks

What does trunks mean?

1. nounShort close-fitting shorts worn by men and boys for swimming.
2. nounThe thick main woody stems of trees.
3. nounThe long flexible noses of elephants, used for grasping and drinking.
4. nounLarge sturdy boxes or chests used for storing or transporting belongings.

Trunks in a sentence

• He packed his swimming trunks for the hotel pool.

• The storm split several oak trunks down the avenue.

• The elephants raised their trunks to spray water over their backs.

• The attic was full of old leather trunks from her grandparents.

• The lifeguard wore red trunks and a whistle on a cord.

• Moss covered the trunks of the old beeches in the wood.

Where does trunks come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin truncus, an adjective and noun meaning 'cut off, maimed, lopped' and, by extension, the main stem of a tree once its branches were stripped away. It travelled into English through Old French tronc during the 1400s, at first naming the woody body of a tree. From that core image of a sturdy central mass, English speakers extended the word in several directions: to the body of a person or animal, to a large sturdy box for storing or carrying goods, and to the long flexible nose of an elephant, which was imagined as a kind of stem. The swimwear sense, short shorts that cover the trunk of the body, grew up in the 1900s and is almost always used in the plural, just like 'shorts' and 'pants'. The single straightforward spelling, with its hard -nk- cluster closed off by the plural -s, makes the word a reliable one to write.

How the word is built

• trunk (main stem, from Latin truncus 'tree stem, body')
• -s (plural)