trunk
/trʌŋk
/- He then sat down with his back to Hunter and Jason and began rooting through the fallen trunk of a tree.
- Many plants have a number of distinct organs: roots, stems or trunks, leaves, fertile parts.
Synonyms
- The posterior communicating artery is sometimes joined with the middle cerebral artery instead of the trunk of the internal carotid.
- These plaques can extend to the great veins, coronary sinus, pulmonary trunk, and main pulmonary arteries.
- Tailor-welded blanks are used in the doors, but the trunk is laser welded and built with two sets of tools.
- Workers cleaned and repaired the Baghdad trunk sewer line and its associated manholes and pumping stations.
- The rash usually starts on the trunk of the body in red bumps.
- They are unlike chickenpox, which develops first on the trunk of the body and is seen in various stages of development.
Synonyms
- The elephants nosed their trunks toward the stream, taking sips with two finger-like appendages.
- The bones belong to an animal in the order Proboscidea - large mammals with trunks - the same order that includes living elephants.
Synonyms
- She took her few clothes from her trunk and walked to the wardrobe with them.
- Two trunks with property are stored under the bed, and also two TVs, one on a fold-out desk, the other on a shelf for the top bunk.
Synonyms
- Both the rear seat and trunk get decent space, and sliding in and out of the car is considerably easier.
- Right now we don't generate enough to have a car with a very heavy frame, trunk space, glove compartment, cup holders and air conditioning.
Synonyms
Derivatives
trunkful
- The elephants are shovelling great trunkfuls of fruit into their mouths.
- You won't catch us sniggering at the idea of someone packing a trunkful of jeans for different leg-size days.
- Much of the fashion is museum quality eighteenth and nineteenth century costumes, including trunkfuls of grand Russian court ball gowns.
trunkless
- But this tapirlike animal seems to have been trunkless.
- Sporadically interspersed with the trees are stands of trunkless Attalea palms, from which the brown capuchins forage for the palm nuts - an unlikely habitat to find monkeys at all, let alone capuchins.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Old French tronc, from Latin truncus.
Trunk comes via Old French from Latin truncus ‘the main stem of a tree’. The word has branched out in several directions. The meaning ‘a tree's main stem’ is behind the sense ‘the human body’ and others with the notion of a central connection, such as trunk road. The ‘chest, box’ meaning arose because early trunks were made out of tree trunks. The circular shape of a tree trunk prompted another branch referring to cylindrical hollow objects, including, in the 16th century, the elephant's trunk. In the 16th and early 17th centuries men wore trunk-hose, full breeches extending to the upper thighs and sometimes padded, worn over tights. The style went out of fashion, but in the theatre actors wore short light breeches over tights, which they called trunks. In late 19th-century America men's shorts for swimming or boxing took over the name. Truncheon (Middle English) comes from the same root. In early use this referred to a piece broken off from, for example, a spear and was also a word for a cudgel. The word came to refer to a staff carried as a symbol of office from the late 16th century and eventually (late 19th century) to a short club carried by a police officer. Truncate (Late Middle English) is unconnected, being from Latin truncare ‘maim’.
Rhymes
- literalization
- literalize
- literalizer
- literally
- literal-minded
- literalness
- literarian
- literarily
- literariness
- literarism
- literary
- literary adviser
- literary advisor
- literary agency
- literary agent
- literary circle
- literary critic
- literary-critical
- literary criticism
- literary editing
- literary editorship
- literary executor
- literary gent
- literary historian
- literary history