Other forms: tacks, tacked, tacking
A tack is a short nail with a wide flat head, the kind you push in with your thumb. A map on the wall, four tacks, one in each corner.
Tack is a verb as well: you tack a notice to a door, and a dressmaker tacks two pieces of cloth with long loose stitches before sewing them properly. Sailors have their own tack, because a boat cannot sail straight into the wind — it goes at an angle, then swings across onto the other tack — and that is where the everyday phrase comes from. Try a different tack and you are coming at the problem from another direction. Mind the spelling: tact is a different word, the art of knowing what not to say. And horse tack is a fourth thing again, the saddle and bridle and reins that live in the tack room.
1nountackA short nail with a wide flat head, pushed in by hand.~55%
“She put the map up with a tack in each corner.”
synonyms: pin
2nounapproachA way of going at something; the direction you decide to take.~10%
“When that failed, he tried a different tack.”
synonyms: approach, line
3verbfastenTo fasten something with tacks, or to sew it with long loose stitches.~27%
“He tacked the notice to the door.”
4nounboatsA boat's angled course against the wind, and the swing from one such course to the other.~8%
“The boat came round onto the other tack.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 94 sentences found in the wild and placed 49 of them on a sense (45 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
tack is a small nail.
TACK → atTACK
Picture a paper map on the wall under attack. A hundred silver nails come at it across the room, hit head first, and hold. Not one falls, and the whole sea turns silver.
hooks ontoattack
Frankish *takkō was a twig — a branch, a shoot — and a sharpened twig is the first nail anybody had. Old French took it as taque, a nail, a pin, a peg; Middle English as takke, a hook or a staple. Further back the root may mean to pinch and to tear, which is what a tack does to whatever you push it into.
Proto-Indo-European
*dHgʰ-n-
Frankish
*takkō — twig, branch, shoot
Middle English
tak
English, today
tack
Built from
From Middle English tak, takke (“hook; staple; nail”), from fro-nor - taque (“nail, pin, peg”), from Frankish takkō (“twig, branch, shoot”), of unknown origin, but possibly from Proto-Indo-European dHgʰ-n-, from the root déHgʰ- (“to pinch; to tear, rip, fray”). Cognate with stq Takke (“bough; branch; twig”), West Frisian takke (“branch”), tûk (“branch, smart, sharp”), Dutch tak (“twig; branch; limb”), {{cog|de|
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA