Other forms: hulks
A hulk is the body of an old ship, stripped and no longer sailing. The rusting hulk, a hulk in the estuary, prison hulks.
Prison hulks were decommissioned warships used as floating prisons in Britain from the 1770s, and they appear at the start of Great Expectations. More generally, a hulk is anything large, useless and abandoned: the hulk of a factory. Of a person it means large and clumsy: a great hulk of a man. Note hulking, which is the adjective and is used almost entirely of people and buildings.
1nounhulkThe body of an old ship, no longer sailing.
“The hulk has been in that estuary since about 1948.”
2nounlargeA large clumsy person.
“A great hulk of a man filled the whole doorway.”
hulk is an abandoned bulk.
Old English hulc named a type of ship, from a Mediterranean word. The word came to mean a ship too old to sail and then anything left as a shell, which is a fairly bleak career for a boat name.
Proto-Germanic
*hulukaz
Proto-West Germanic
*huluk
Old English
hulc — light ship; heavy, clumsy ship; cabin, hovel, hut
Middle Low German
hulk
Middle Dutch
hulk
Middle English
hulk
English, today
hulk
Built from
From Middle English hulk, hulke, holke (“hut; shed for hogs; type of ship; husk, pod, shell; large, clumsy person; a giant”) (probably reinforced by Middle Dutch hulk, huelc, and Middle Low German hulk, holk, hollek (“freighter, cargo ship, barge”)), from Old English hulc (“light ship; heavy, clumsy ship; cabin, hovel, hut”), from Proto-West Germanic huluk, hulik, from Proto-Germanic hulukaz, hulikaz (“something hollowed or dug out, cavity”), equivalent to hole/hollow + -ock. Cognate with Old High German holcho (“cargo or transport ship, barge”) (whence Middle High German holche, modern German Holk), Old Norse hólkr (“metal tube, ring”), dialectal Norwegian holk, hylke (“wooden barrel”), Middle English holken (“to dig out, gouge”). Relation to Medieval Latin hulcus (“ship”) is uncertain, as Old English may have borrowed from Latin or vice versa, but the form holcas rather points to borrowing from ὁλκάς (compare
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA