buck

Meanings

Noun

• A male deer, antelope, sheep, goat, rabbit, hare, and sometimes the male of other animals such as the hamster, ferret and shad.
• An uncastrated sheep, a ram.
• A young buck; an adventurous, impetuous, dashing, or high-spirited young man.
• A fop or dandy.
• A black or Native American man.
• A dollar (one hundred cents).
• A rand (currency unit).
• Money.
• One hundred.
• An object of various types, placed on a table to indicate turn or status; such as a brass object, placed in rotation on a US Navy wardroom dining table to indicate which officer is to be served first, or an item passed around a poker table indicating the dealer or placed in the pot to remind the winner of some privilege or obligation when his or her turn to deal next comes.
• Blame; responsibility; scapegoating; finger-pointing.
• The body of a post mill, particularly in East Anglia. See Wikipedia:Windmill machinery.
• One million dollars.
• A euro.
• A frame on which firewood is sawed; a sawhorse; a sawbuck.
• a leather-covered frame used for gymnastic vaulting
• A wood or metal frame used by automotive customizers and restorers to assist in the shaping of sheet metal bodywork. See .
• Synonym of buck dance
• Synonym of mule
• 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.

Verb

• 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 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 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 press a reinforcing device (bucking bar) against (the force of a rivet) in order to absorb vibration and increase expansion. See Wikipedia: Rivet:Installation.
• To saw a felled tree into shorter lengths, as for firewood.
• To output a voltage that is lower than the input voltage. See Wikipedia: Buck converter
• 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.

Related

Similar words

• stag
• billygoat, billy, buckling, buck-goat, he-goat
• hob, hob-ferret
• ram, tup
• bill, bone, clam, cucumber, dead president, greenback, note, one-spot, paper, simoleon, single, smackeroo
• button, dealer button

Origin

• From Middle English buc, bucke, bukke, from Old English buc, bucc, bucca, from Proto-West Germanic *bukk, from Proto-Germanic *bukkaz, *bukkô, from Proto-Indo-European *bʰuǵ- ("ram"). puck.
• Cognate with German Bock, Norwegian bukk, West Frisian bok ("he-goat"); also Albanian buzë, Old Armenian բուծ ("sucking lamb"), Persian بز ("goat"), Sanskrit बुक्क.
• Sense 8 from American English, an abbreviation of buckskin as a unit of trade among Indians and Europeans in frontier days (attested from 1748).
• Senses 10 and 11 from 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 hence the term ("pass the buck") used in poker, eventually a Silver dollar was used in place of a knife leading to a dollar to be referred to as a buck.
• Senses 15 & 16 are from Dutch bok ("sawhorse"), a shortened form of zaagbok.
• From Middle Low German bucken ("to bend") or Middle Dutch bucken, bocken, intensive forms of Old Saxon būgan and Old Dutch *būgan ("to bend, bow"), both from Proto-West Germanic *beugan, from Proto-Germanic *būganą ("to bend"), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰūgʰ- ("to bend"). Influenced in some senses by buck “male goat” (see above).
• Compare bow and elbow.
• See beech.
• From Middle English bouken, ultimately related to the root of beech. Cognate with Middle High German büchen, Swedish byka, Danish byge and Low German būken.