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wrack

UK/ɹæk/US/ɹæk/
nounC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,075 of 15,258neutral

Wrack is seaweed thrown up on the shore, or ruin. Bladder wrack, wrack on the tideline, wrack and ruin.

Wrack and ruin is the phrase that keeps the second sense alive, and it means complete decay. The seaweed sense is technical and ordinary: bladder wrack is the brown weed with the poppable air bladders.

User:Stemonitis · CC BY-SA 2.5

Definitions of wrack

  1. 1nounwrackSeaweed thrown up on the shore, or ruin.C2

    “After the storm, the beach was covered with piles of wrack and driftwood.”

wrack is a thing.

Where it comes from

Middle English wrake comes from Old English words for misery and vengeance, and merged with a word for wreckage.

  1. Old English

    wracu

  2. Middle English

    wrake

  3. English, today

    wrack

Built from

  • wræc · Old English — misery, suffering

From Middle English wrake, wrache, wreche, from a merger of Old English wracu, wræc (“misery, suffering”) and Old English wrǣċ (“vengeance, revenge”). See also wrake.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

wrack in the wild

  • Fucus serratus is a seaweed of the north Atlantic Ocean, known as toothed wrack, serrated wrack, or saw wrack.

    Fucus serratus

  • Wrack may refer to: wrack (mathematics), a concept in knot theory wrack (seaweed), several species of seaweed beach wrack, organic material deposited at high tide on beaches.

    Wrack

  • Salt pannes generally start when a mat of organic debris (known as wrack) is deposited upon existing vegetation, killing it.

    Salt pannes and pools

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.