Other forms: rocks, rocking, rocked
Rock is the hard grey material a mountain is made of, and a rock is a big lump of it. The boulder the farmer ploughs around, the wet slabs at the foot of a cliff, a stone too heavy to lift with one hand.
Size splits the two Englishes: in Britain a rock is large and a small one is a stone, while an American calls the pebble in a shoe a rock. It is also a verb — to rock is to move gently back and forth, so you rock a baby, a boat rocks in the swell, and a rocking chair does nothing else. Out of that came rock music, and with it rock band, rock star, rocked the crowd. Someone steady is your rock. A drink on the rocks has ice in it; a marriage on the rocks is finishing.
1nounrockThe hard solid material that mountains and cliffs are made of.~2%
“They drilled through fifty metres of rock.”
2nounlargeA large stone or piece of that material.~6%
“A rock had fallen across the path.”
3verbmoveTo move gently back and forth, or to move something that way.~2%
“She rocked the pram with one foot.”
4nounloudLoud guitar-based popular music.~88%
“He has played in a rock band since school.”
5noundependSomeone you can always depend on.~2%
“Through all of it, her brother was her rock.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 16 sentences found in the wild and placed 16 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
rock is a hard natural material.
The stone sense of rock reached English twice. Old English had rocc, seen in stanrocc, a high stone peak, which gave Middle English rocke for a rock formation; then Anglo-Norman roche arrived on top of it, from Medieval Latin rocca, a word first written down in 767 and of unknown origin. French still keeps roc and roche.
Middle English
rokke
English, today
rock
Built from
From Middle English rokke. Middle English rocke, rokke (“rock formation”), from Old English rocc (“rock”), as in Old English stānrocc (“high stone rock, peak, obelisk”), and also later from Anglo-Norman roche, (compare Modern French roc, roche, rocher), from Medieval Latin rocca (attested 767), of unknown origin, sometimes said to be of cel (in particular, perhaps cel-gau -) origin (compare Breton roc'h). Related also to Middle Low German rocke (“rock ledge”). One suggestion is that it derives from Vulgar Latin rupica, from rupes (compare rupico*).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA