Other forms: hacking, hacked, hacks
To hack is to cut roughly with heavy blows. Hack through the brambles, hacked at the branch, hack it down.
The roughness is the point: hacking is not neat cutting. It also means to break into a computer system — hacked the account, a hacking attempt — and that sense now dominates. A hack is separately a trick or shortcut: a life hack, a kitchen hack. And an old use calls a mediocre writer a hack, from hackney, a hired horse. Note hacking cough, meaning a dry repeated one.
1verbhackTo cut roughly with heavy blows.
“He hacked a path through about thirty feet of it.”
2verbbreakTo break into a computer system.
“The account was hacked twice in one week.”
3nountrickA trick or shortcut.
“Here's a useful hack: put a wooden spoon across the pot to stop it boiling over.”
hack is a rough cutting, or a break-in.
Old English haccian meant to cut into pieces, from a Germanic root about chopping. The computer sense came from 1960s student slang at MIT, where hacking meant an inventive piece of tinkering, and only later acquired the meaning of breaking in.
Middle English
hakken
English, today
hack
Built from
From Middle English hakken. From Middle English hacken, hakken, from Old English haccian (“to hack”), from Proto-West Germanic hakkōn, from Proto-Germanic hakkōną (“to chop; hoe; hew”), from Proto-Indo-European keg-, keng- (“to be sharp; peg; hook; handle”). Cognate with stq häkje (“to hack”), West Frisian hakje (“to hack”), Dutch hakken (“to chop up; hack”), German hacken (“to chop; hack; hoe”), Danish hakke (“to chop”), Swedish hacka (“to hack; chop”), French hacher (“to chop”). Related to hatch.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA