Other forms: brinks
The brink is the very edge — of a cliff, a riverbank, a drop. Standing on the brink with your toes over nothing, looking down at the water.
The figurative use has taken over, and it nearly always comes as on the brink of: on the brink of war, on the brink of collapse, on the brink of tears, on the brink of a discovery. That is what separates brink from edge. An edge is any border, including the edge of a table; a brink is the edge of a fall, the point where one more step changes everything. Brinkmanship is the political art of walking right up to that point on purpose to frighten the other side. You stand on the brink, not at it, and the word rarely goes plural.
1nounbrinkThe edge of a steep drop, such as a cliff or a riverbank.
“Loose stones slid off the brink and rattled down the rock face.”
2nounvergeThe point just before something serious happens.
“The company was on the brink of bankruptcy when the order came in.”
brink is an edge.
Brink arrived with Scandinavian settlers: Old Norse brekka, a slope, from Proto-Germanic *brinkǭ, a hill or the edge of land, and behind that a Proto-Indo-European root *bʰren- meaning to project, to stick out. Icelandic brekka still means a slope, and Irish braine means the prow of a boat — the part that juts out over nothing.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰren- — to project
Proto-Germanic
*brinkǭ
Old Norse
*brenka
Middle English
brinke
English, today
brink
Built from
From Middle English brinke, brenke, from Old Norse brenka, brekka, from Proto-Germanic brinkǭ, brinkaz (“hill, edge (of land)”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰren- (“to project”). Cognate with Dutch brink (“grassland”), regional German Brink, Icelandic brekka (“slope”); also txb prenke (“island”), Irish braine (“prow”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA