Other forms: necks
Your neck is the part of the body connecting the head to the shoulders. A stiff neck, round her neck, break your neck.
It also names a narrow part of anything: the neck of a bottle, the neck of a guitar, a neck of land. In racing, a neck is a winning margin of about that length. The idioms are many: a pain in the neck, breathing down your neck, stick your neck out, up to your neck in it, and neck and neck, meaning exactly level.
1nounneckThe part of the body connecting head and shoulders.
“She wore a warm scarf around her neck.”
2nounnarrowA narrow part of something.
“Hold the bottle by its neck when you pour.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
neck is a connecting or narrow part.
Old English hnecca meant the back of the neck, and the front had a different word. Nape survives from the same area, and neck widened to cover the whole thing.
Middle English
nekke
English, today
neck
Built from
From Middle English nekke. From Middle English nekke, nakke, from Old English hnecca, hnæcca (“neck, nape”), from Proto-West Germanic hnakkō, from Proto-Germanic hnakkô (“nape, neck”), from Proto-Indo-European knog-, kneg- (“back of the head, nape, neck”). Cognate with Scots nek (“neck”), frr neek, neeke, Nak (“neck”), stq Näkke (“neck”), West Frisian nekke (“neck”), Dutch nek (“neck”), German Low German Nack (“neck”), German Nacken (“nape of the neck”), Danish nakke (“neck”), Swedish nacke (“nape of the neck”), Icelandic hnakki (“neck”), xto kñuk (“neck, nape”). Possibly a mutated variant of kneug/k (compare Old English hnocc (“hook, penis”), Welsh cnwch (“joint, knob”), Latvian knaūķis (“dwarf”). a doublet of nek. More at nook. Displaced halse (“neck, throat”) and swire* (“neck”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA