deck

UK/ˈdɛk/US/ˈdɛk/

nounB13 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,315 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: decks

The deck is the flat floor you walk on aboard a ship. Several of them stacked, and the top one open to the sky.

Ships gave English a great deal from this word: below decks, all hands on deck, clearing the decks before action. It spread to buildings and gardens, where a deck is a raised wooden platform, and to buses, since a double-decker has two of them. Cards use it too, as an American deck is a British pack. There is also a verb meaning to knock somebody flat, which is quite unrelated to any of that.

Definitions of deck

1noundeckA floor or level on a ship.B1~59%
“He came up on deck for some air.”
2nounraisedA raised wooden platform beside a house.B2~2%
“They ate breakfast out on the deck.”
3nounpackA pack of playing cards.B1~39%
“She shuffled the deck twice.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense (9 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Phrases it lives in

all hands on deck — everybody is needed to help

Where it comes from

Middle Dutch
dec — roof, covering
Middle English
dekke
English, today
deck

From Middle English dekke, borrowed from Middle Dutch dec (“roof, covering”), from Middle Dutch decken, from Old Dutch thecken, from Proto-West Germanic þakkjan, from Proto-Germanic þakjaną. Formed the same: German Decke (“covering, blanket”). a doublet of thatch and thack.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, Sea & Sailing

First appears in chapter 4 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

deck in the wild

Playing cards are typically palm-sized for convenient handling, and usually are sold together in a set as a deck of cards or pack of cards.
Playing card
The type covered here has cables suspended between towers, with vertical suspender cables that transfer the live and dead loads of the deck below, upon which traffic crosses.
Suspension bridge
The main cables continue beyond the pillars to deck-level supports, and further continue to connections with anchors in the ground.
Suspension bridge
The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is the surface on which its aircraft take off and land, essentially a miniature airfield at sea.
Flight deck
In 1952, HMS Triumph became the first aircraft carrier to trial the angled flight deck.
Flight deck

1 / 4

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

Definitions of deck

1noundeckA floor or level on a ship.B1~59%

“He came up on deck for some air.”

2nounraisedA raised wooden platform beside a house.B2~2%

“They ate breakfast out on the deck.”

3nounpackA pack of playing cards.B1~39%

“She shuffled the deck twice.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 19 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense (9 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.