buck
/ˈbʌk/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: 4.01 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A male deer, antelope, sheep, goat, rabbit, hare, and sometimes the male of other animals such as the hamster, ferret, salmonid, shad, skunk and kangaroo.
noun
A young buck; an adventurous, impetuous, dashing, or high-spirited young man.
Example Sentences
- "There are all kinds of game in the valley, and you are unlucky if you do not see a giraffe or an ostrich, or at least a herd of buck."
- "Swankey of the Body Guard himself, that dangerous youth, and the greatest buck of all the Indian army now on leave, was one day discovered by Major Dobbin tête-à-tête with Amelia, and describing the sport of pig-sticking to her with great humour and eloquence […]"
- "This pusillanimous creature thinks himself, and would be thought, a buck."
- "The Captain was then a buck and dandy, during the reign of those two successive dynasties, of the first rank of the second order ; the characteristic of which very respectable rank of fashionables I hold to be, that their spurs impinge upon the pavement oftener than upon the sides of a horse."
- "As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl."
- "It as not for him to stroll past the groups of watchful girls, blowing a flute made of an eagle's wing bone, as the flirtatious young bucks did."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *bʰuǵ- Proto-Germanic *bukkaz Proto-Germanic *bukkô Proto-West Germanic *bukkō Old English bucca Middle English bukke English buck Inherited from Middle English bukke. Doublet of puck (“billy goat”). Currency-related senses hail from American English, a clipping of buckskin as a unit of trade among Native Americans and Europeans in frontier days (attested from 1748). The idea of rigidly standing implements is instilled by Dutch bok (“sawhorse”) as in zaagbok (“sawbuck”). The sense of an object indicating someone’s turn then occurred in American English, possibly originating from the game poker, where a knife (typically with a hilt made from a stag horn) was used as a place-marker to signify whose turn it was to deal. The place-marker was commonly referred to as a buck, which reinforced the term “pass the buck” used in poker, and eventually a silver dollar was used in place of a knife, which also led to a dollar being referred to as a buck.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *bʰūgʰ-, bucken, *bukkōn, *bukkōną, *bʰugʰ-, bouken
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈbʌk/
- British English: /ˈbʌk/
Usage
- American usage
- British usage
- Obsolete
- Dated
- Derogatory
- Australian usage
- Slang
- Canadian usage