speck
/spɛk/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.02 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A tiny spot or particle, especially of dirt.
noun
A small etheostomoid fish, Etheostoma stigmaeum, common in the eastern United States.
Example Sentences
- "a tiny speck of soot"
- "Matvey was already holding up the shirt like a horse’s collar, and, blowing off some invisible speck, he slipped it with obvious pleasure over the well-groomed body of his master."
- "[Rural solar plant] schemes are of little help to industry or other heavy users of electricity. Nor is solar power yet as cheap as the grid. For all that, the rapid arrival of electric light to Indian villages is long overdue. When the national grid suffers its next huge outage, as it did in July 2012 when hundreds of millions were left in the dark, look for specks of light in the villages."
- "a. 1864, Walter Savage Landor, quoted in 1971, Ernest Dilworth, Walter Savage Landor, Twayne Publishers, page 88, Onward, and many bright specks bubble up along the blue Aegean; islands, every one of which, if the songs and stories of the pilots are true, is the monument of a greater man than I am."
- "Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."
- "He has not a speck of money."
Etymology
From Middle English spekke, from Old English specca (“small spot, stain”), from the same ultimate source as Proto-Germanic *sprakô (“spark”). Cognate with Low German spaken (“to spot with wet”).