trunk
Meanings
noun
- Part of a body.
- The usually single, more or less upright part of a tree, between the roots and the branches.
- The torso; especially, the human torso.
- The conspicuously extended, mobile, nose-like organ of an animal such as a sengi, a tapir or especially an elephant. The trunks of various kinds of animals might be adapted to probing and sniffing, as in the sengis, or be partly prehensile, as in the tapir, or be a versatile prehensile organ for manipulation, feeding, drinking and fighting as in the elephant.
- A container.
- A large suitcase, chest, or similar receptacle for carrying or storing personal possessions, usually with a hinged, often domed lid, and handles at each end, so that generally it takes two persons to carry a full trunk.
- A box or chest usually covered with leather, metal, or cloth, or sometimes made of leather, hide, or metal, for holding or transporting clothes or other goods.
- The luggage storage compartment of a sedan/saloon-style car.
- A storage compartment fitted behind the seat of a motorcycle.
- A channel for flow of some kind.
- A major circuit between telephone switchboards or other switching equipment.
- A chute or conduit, or a watertight shaft connecting two or more decks.
verb
- To lop off; to curtail; to truncate.
- To extract (ores) from the slimes in which they are contained, by means of a trunk.
- To provide simultaneous network access to multiple clients by sharing a set of circuits, carriers, channels, or frequencies.
name
- A surname from German.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
From Middle English tronke, trunke, from Old French tronc (“alms box, tree trunk, headless body”), from Latin truncus (“a stock, lopped tree trunk”), from truncus (“cut off, maimed, mutilated”). For the verb, compare French tronquer, and see truncate. Doublet of truncus and tronk.
Synonyms
Derived words
Translations
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.