cock
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "cock", 4-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "cock" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "cock" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
cock is aEnglishnoun. It means: A male bird, especially: Pronounced /kɒk/. It ranks #4,839 in English word frequency. Often confused with cop and con.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | cock |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /kɒk/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #4,839 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for cock is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /kɒk/. Corpus data places it at rank #4,839 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 21 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for cock, with forms such as "ccock", "ccok", and "cocck". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "cop", "con", "cow", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English cok, from Old English coc, cocc (“cock, male bird”), from Proto-West Germanic *kokk, from Proto-Germanic *kukkaz (“cock”), probably of onomatopoeic origin. Cognate with Middle Dutch cocke (“cock, male bird”) and Old Norse kokkr ("cock"; … Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is cock, spelled C-O-C-K, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A male bird, especially:
- 2A male bird, especially:
- 3A valve or tap for controlling flow in plumbing.
- 4The hammer of a firearm trigger mechanism.
- 5A penis.
- 6The circle at the end of the rink.
- 7The state of being cocked; an upward turn, tilt or angle.
- 8A stupid, obnoxious or contemptible person.
- 9Nonsense; rubbish; a fraud.
- 10An apocryphal story supposedly describing a public event, once sold by street hawkers.
- 11A man; a fellow.
- 12A boastful tilt of one's head or hat.
- 13Shuttlecock.
- 14A vane in the shape of a cock; a weathercock.
- 15A chief person; a leader or master.
- 16A leading thing.
- 17The crow of a cock, especially the first crow in the morning; cockcrow.
- 18A male fish, especially a salmon or trout.
- 19The style or gnomon of a sundial.
- 20The indicator of a balance.
- 21The bridge piece that affords a bearing for the pivot of a balance in a clock or watch.
Etymology
From Middle English cok, from Old English coc, cocc (“cock, male bird”), from Proto-West Germanic *kokk, from Proto-Germanic *kukkaz (“cock”), probably of onomatopoeic origin. Cognate with Middle Dutch cocke (“cock, male bird”) and Old Norse kokkr ("cock"; whence Danish kok (“cock”), dialectal Swedish kokk (“cock”)). Reinforced by Old French coc, from the same origin. The sense "penis" is attested since at least the 1610s, with the compound pillicock (“penis”) attested since 1325.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: ccock,ccok,cocck,cockk,cokc,occk
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for cock
Misspelling Variants of "cock"
Frequency rank: #4,839 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter C in our English index: