hunker

See also: Hunker

English

WOTD – 10 March 2008

English Wikipedia has an article on:

hunker

Wikipedia

Originally Scottish. Origin uncertain, but probably of Germanic origin, perhaps *hunk- a nasalised variant of *huk- (compare Scots hoonk, hounk, variants of huk, hok (“to squat, crouch”); Scots hocker (“to crouch down, hunker”)), all of North Germanic origin, from Old Norse huka (“to crouch”), ^[1] from Proto-Germanic *hūkan- (“to squat”), from *hūkkan-, back-formed from the iterative *huk(k)ōn-, from Proto-Indo-European *kuk-néh₂, from *kewk- (“to curve, bend”) (also the source of high).^[2]

Probable cognates include Old Norse húka, Dutch huiken, and German hocken.

hunker (third-person singular simple present hunkers, present participle hunkering, simple past and past participle hunkered)

To crouch, squat or lie down

Unknown

hunker (plural hunkers)

^ “hunker”, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, →ISBN.
^ Guus Kroonen (2013) “hukan”, in Alexander Lubotsky, editor, Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 11)‎^[1], Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN, page 252

hunker