Yak

How to spell yak

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce yak

What does yak mean?

1. nounA large, long-haired ox native to the mountains of Central Asia, used for milk, meat, and carrying loads.
2. verbTo talk at length about trivial matters, especially in an annoying or unstoppable way.

Yak in a sentence

• noun

  The trekkers loaded their gear onto a sturdy yak before climbing higher.

• verb

  My neighbours yak for hours on the phone every single evening.

• noun

  Herders in Tibet rely on the yak for milk, wool, and transport.

• verb

  The colleagues at the next desk love to yak instead of finishing their reports.

Where does yak come from?

Language of origin: Other

The animal name comes from Tibetan, where the word g-yag described the shaggy, long-haired wild ox of the high Himalayan plateau. English picked it up in the early nineteenth century as European explorers and naturalists encountered the beast in Central Asia, anglicising the spelling to the short, blunt 'yak'. Strictly, the Tibetan term referred to the male of the species, but English speakers quickly applied it to both sexes. The informal verb meaning 'to chatter on and on' is a completely separate and much later word: it arose in mid-twentieth-century American slang as an imitation of the rattling sound of constant talk, and it has no connection to the animal beyond the coincidence of spelling. Because the word is so short and was borrowed whole rather than built from familiar roots, the spelling has stayed simple and stable.

How the word is built

• yak (single root, from Tibetan g-yag, the long-haired ox)