buck
Meanings
- A male deer, antelope, sheep, goat, rabbit, hare, and sometimes the male of other animals such as the hamster, ferret, salmonid, shad and kangaroo.
- An uncastrated sheep, a ram.
- An antelope of either sex; compare with Afrikaans bok.
- The sound made by a chicken.
- A young buck; an adventurous, impetuous, dashing, or high-spirited young man.
- A fop or dandy.
- A black or Native American man.
- An Aboriginal man.
- Lowest rank; a private.
- A unit of a particular currency
- A dollar (one hundred cents).
- A rand (currency unit).
- To copulate, as bucks and does.
- To bend; buckle.
- To leap upward arching its back, coming down with head low and forelegs stiff, forcefully kicking its hind legs upward, often in an attempt to dislodge or throw a rider or pack.
- To throw (a rider or pack) by bucking.
- To resist obstinately; oppose or object strongly.
- To move or operate in a sharp, jerking, or uneven manner.
- To overcome or shed (e.g., an impediment or expectation), in pursuit of a goal; to force a way through despite (an obstacle); to resist or proceed against.
- To subject to a mode of punishment which consists of tying the wrists together, passing the arms over the bent knees, and putting a stick across the arms and in the angle formed by the knees.
- To strive or aspire e.g. to a promotion.
- To press a heavy, shaped bucking bar against the bucktail of a rivet, while the opposite end (the rivet factory head) is hammered by a rivet gun, to upset the bucktail into an appropriate shape, most commonly a pancake-shape.
- To saw a felled tree into shorter lengths, as for firewood.
- To output a voltage that is lower than the input voltage.
- To fuck.
- The beech tree.
- Lye or suds in which cloth is soaked in the operation of bleaching, or in which clothes are washed.
- The cloth or clothes soaked or washed.
- To soak, steep or boil in lye or suds, as part of the bleaching process.
- To wash (clothes) in lye or suds, or, in later usage, by beating them on stones in running water
- To break up or pulverize, as ores.
- The body of a cart or waggon, especially the front part.
- Belly, breast, chest.
- Size.
- To swell out.
- To boast or brag.
- An English surname transferred from the nickname.
- A male given name from Old English.
- A German surname, a variant of Buch.
- An unincorporated community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, United States.
- A township in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.
- A township in Hardin County, Ohio, United States.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
From Middle English bukke, bucke, buc, from Old English buc, bucc, bucca (“he-goat, stag”), from Proto-West Germanic *bukk, *bukkō, from Proto-Germanic *bukkaz, *bukkô (“buck”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰuǵ- (“ram”). Doublet of puck (“billy goat”). Currency-related senses hail from American English, a clipping of buckskin as a unit of trade among Indians 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.