hanker
/ˈhæŋkə(ɹ)/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.97 in modern English
13
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "If you hanker for chocolate, you'll like this fudge recipe."
- "“O ’tis true enough, faith. I cannot understand Farmer Boldwood being such a fool at his time of life as to ho and hanker after thik^([sic]) woman in the way ’a do, and she not care a bit about en.”"
- "“Baked, they were tough; and even boiled, they warn’t things for a hungry man to hanker after.”"
- "I objected. I don’t know whether it is that I am built wrong, but I never did seem to hanker after tombstones myself."
- "[…] it made us heroes, and that was what Tom Sawyer had always been hankering to be."
- "She bade him good-night and hurried down the road. Next day he took her in a little watch with a brooch to pin on her dress. She had been hankering for it."
Etymology
With a secondary frequentative suffix -er, ultimately pointing to Proto-Germanic *hankōną, an iterative to *hanhaną (“to hang”). Related to Dutch hunkeren (“to crave”), which continues the zero-grade iterative.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *hankōną