''bank'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''bank'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260213210016-00-⌔

bank - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

bank (countable and uncountable, plural banks)

• (countable) An institution where one can place and borrow money and take care of financial affairs.
  • ✤ Finance is seldom romantic. But the idea of peer-to-peer lending comes close. This is an industry that brings together individual savers and lenders on online platforms. […] Banks and credit-card firms are kept out of the picture. Talk to enough people in the field and someone is bound to mention the “democratisation of finance”.¹
• (countable) A branch office of such an institution.
  • ✤ Synonym: (archaic) Lombard house
• (countable) An underwriter or controller of a card game.
  • ✤ Synonyms: banker, banque
• (countable) A fund from deposits or contributions, to be used in transacting business; a joint stock or capital.
  • ✤ Let it be no bank or common stock, but every man be master of his own money.²
• (gambling, countable) The sum of money etc. which the dealer or banker has as a fund from which to draw stakes and pay losses.
• (slang, uncountable) Money; profit.
  • ✤ Military dude was working for a drug dealer, right? and making good bank with it—he was making good money.³
• (countable) In certain games, such as dominos, a fund of pieces from which the players are allowed to draw.
• (countable, chiefly in combination) A safe and guaranteed place of storage for and retrieval of important items or goods.
  • ✤ *blood bank; data bank; sperm bank *
• (countable) A device used to store coins or currency.
  • ✤ If you want to buy a bicycle, you need to put the money in your piggy bank.
• (countable, music) A collection of instrument data on a digital synthesizer.
  • ✤ All of the drum kits are on bank 1.

Verb

bank (third-person singular simple present banks, present participle banking, simple past and past participle banked)

• (intransitive) To deal with a bank or financial institution, or for an institution to provide financial services to a client.
  • ✤ He banked with Barclays.
  • ✤ the sort of face you would happily bank with⁴
• (transitive) To put into a bank.
  • ✤ I’m going to bank the money.
• (transitive, slang) To conceal in the rectum for use in prison.
  • ✤ Johnny banked some coke for me.
• (transitive, finance) To provide banking services to.
  • ✤ They proposed an ambitious plan to bank people in remote rural communities.
  • For quotations using this term, see Citations:bank.

Noun

bank (plural banks)

• (hydrology) An edge of river, lake, or other watercourse.
  • ✤ Tiber trembled underneath her banks.⁵
  • ✤ On the opposite bank of the river other Chinese units attacked Taoshih and Yunmeng north-west of Hankow.⁶
  • ✤ Just upstream of Dryburgh Abbey, a reproduction of a classical Greek temple stands at the top of a wooded hillock on the river’s north bank.⁷
• (nautical, hydrology) An elevation under the sea; a shallow area of shifting sand, gravel, mud, and so forth
  • ✤ Synonym: bar
  • ✤ the banks of Newfoundland
• (geography) A slope of earth, sand, etc.; an embankment.
• (aviation) The incline of an aircraft, especially during a turn.
• (rail transport) An incline, a hill.
  • ✤ This is the hardest duty on the railway, for the trains are heavy and there are some long 1 in 40 banks.⁸
  • ✤ It’s just as quick out of the blocks. The five-car unit has three engines, giving it 2,820hp to play with, so the once-‘feared’ Devon banks of Hemerdon, Rattery and Dainton are child’s play to these trains.⁹
• A mass of clouds.
  • ✤ The bank of clouds on the horizon announced the arrival of the predicted storm front.
• (mining) The face of the coal at which miners are working.
• (mining) A deposit of ore or coal, worked by excavations above water level.
• (mining) The ground at the top of a shaft.
  • ✤ Ores are brought to bank.

Verb

bank (third-person singular simple present banks, present participle banking, simple past and past participle banked)

• (intransitive, aviation) To roll or incline laterally in order to turn.
• (transitive) To cause (an aircraft) to bank.
• (transitive) To form into a bank or heap, to bank up.
  • ✤ to bank sand
• (intransitive, of clouds) To form a bank; to gather in masses.
  • ✤ Synonym: bank up
  • ✤ […] clouds banking above the gravel road, their flat slate-blue bottoms threatening freezing rain or an early snowfall.¹⁰
• (transitive) To cover the embers of a fire with ashes in order to retain heat.
• (transitive) To raise a mound or dike about; to enclose, defend, or fortify with a bank; to embank.
  • ✤ Aristoma∣chus would haue them to be stript from their leaues in winter, & in any hand to be banked well about, that the water stand not there in any hollow furrow or hole lower than the other ground¹¹
• (transitive, obsolete) To pass by the banks of.
  • ✤ Have I not heard these islanders shout out/Vive le roi! as I have banked their towns?¹²
• (rail transport, UK) To provide additional power for a train ascending a bank (incline) by attaching another locomotive.
  • ✤ Some interesting facts have recently been made known by the L.N.E.R. concerning the 178-ton Garratt 2-8-0 + 0-8-2 engine No. 2395, which since construction in 1925 has spent the whole of its working life banking coal trains up the 3 miles of 1 in 40 between Wentworth junction and West Silkstone, on the Worsborough branch, near Barnsley.¹³
  • ✤ […] the 4-4-0 unhappily stalled after a stop on Reading Old Bank with its eight-coach load and the Reading Up Line pilot, a “Hall”, had to bank the train into Reading General.¹⁴
  • ✤ Soon after leaving Bebra the line rises, mostly at 1 in 74, for 7 miles to Cornberg and all trains of over 400 tons are banked.¹⁵

Noun

bank (plural banks)

• A row or panel of items stored or grouped together.
  • ✤ a bank of switches
  • ✤ a bank of pay phones
  • ✤ Wanderers were finally woken from their slumber when Kevin Davies brought a fine save out of Brad Guzan while, minutes after the restart, Klasnic was blocked out by a bank of Villa defenders.¹⁶
• A row of keys on a musical keyboard or the equivalent on a typewriter keyboard.
• (computing) A contiguous block of memory that is of fixed, hardware-dependent size, but often larger than a page and partitioning the memory such that two distinct banks do not overlap.
• (pinball) A set of multiple adjacent drop targets.

Verb

bank (third-person singular simple present banks, present participle banking, simple past and past participle banked)

• (transitive, order and arrangement) To arrange or order in a row.

Noun

bank (plural banks)

• A bench, as for rowers in a galley; also, a tier of oars.
  • ✤ Placed on their banks, the lusty Trojans sweep/Neptune’s smooth face, and cleave the yielding deep.¹⁷
• A bench or seat for judges in court.
• The regular term of a court of law, or the full court sitting to hear arguments upon questions of law, as distinguished from a sitting at nisi prius, or a court held for jury trials. See banc¹⁸
• (archaic, printing) A kind of table used by printers.
• (music) A bench, or row of keys belonging to a keyboard, as in an organ.¹⁹

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, General American without æ-raising) IPA: /ˈbæŋk/, [ˈbæŋk]
• (Standard Southern British, Northern England, Scotland, Wales) IPA: /ˈbaŋk/
• (US, Canada, æ-raising) IPA: /ˈbeɪ̯ŋk/, [ˈbeɪ̯ŋk] ~ [ˈbɛ̃ŋk]
  • Audio (US, æ-raising): 🔊
• (Australian) IPA: /ˈbæːŋk/, [ˈbæːŋk], (æ-raising) [ˈbeːŋk]
• (New Zealand) IPA: /ˈbɛŋk/
• Rhymes: -æŋk
• Hyphenation: bank

Etymology 1

🖼️ ➺

Inherited from Middle English banke, from Middle French banque, from Italian banca (“counter, moneychanger’s bench or table”), from Lombardic bank (“bench, counter”), from Proto-West Germanic ﹡banki, from Proto-Germanic ﹡bankiz (“bench, counter”), from Proto-Indo-European ﹡bʰeg- (“to turn, curve, bend, bow”). Doublet of bench, banc, and banco.

For the bench-bank relation, compare typologically Russian ла́вка (lávka), прила́вок (prilávok).

Etymology 2

🖼️ ➺

From Middle English bank, banke, from Old English ﹡banca (“bench”) (attested in Old English hōbanca (“couch”) and Old English banc (“bank, hillock, embankment”), from Proto-West Germanic ﹡bankō, from Proto-Germanic ﹡bankô. Akin to Old Norse bakki (“elevation, hill”), Norwegian bakke (“slope, hill”).

Etymology 3

From Middle English bank, banke, from Old French banc (“bench”), from Frankish ﹡banki, from Proto-Germanic ﹡bankiz (“bench”). Akin to Old English benċ (“bench”).

Etymology 4

Probably from French banc. Of Germanic origin, and akin to English bench.

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 2013 June 1, “End of the peer show”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, page 71: ↩

2. 1625, Francis[Bacon], “Of Usury”, in The Essayes […], 3rd edition, London: […] Iohn Haviland for Hanna Barret, →OCLC: ↩

3. 2010, Paul Bouchard, Enlistment, page 113: ↩

4. 1979, Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: ↩

5. 1599 (first performance), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Iulius Cæsar”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i]: ↩

6. 1943 June 8, “Jap Remnants Suffer Heavy Casualties: Alerts In Chungking”, in The Bombay Chronicle ‎${}^{[1]}$, volume XXXI, number 134, page 1: ↩

7. 2014 September 16, Ian Jack, “Is this the end of Britishness”, in The Guardian: ↩

8. 1940 December, O. S. M. Raw, “The Rhodesia Railways—II”, in Railway Magazine, page 640: ↩

9. 2025 November 12, ‘Mystery Shopper’, “Is Devon the cream of the crop?”, in RAIL, number 1048, page 48: ↩

10. 2011 December 14, Sandra Birdsell, The Chrome Suite, Emblem Editions, →ISBN: ↩

11. 1601, C[aius] Plinius Secundus [i.e., Pliny the Elder], “”, in Philemon Holland, transl., The Historie of the World. Commonly Called, The Naturall Historie of C. Plinius Secundus. […],, London: […] Adam Islip, →OCLC: ↩

12. c. 1595, William Shakespeare, King John, act 5, scene 2: ↩

13. 1942 March, “Notes and News: Locomotive Notes”, in Railway Magazine, page 93: ↩

14. 1960 July, “Motive Power Miscellany: Western Region”, in Trains Illustrated, page 443: ↩

15. 1960 September, P. Ransome-Wallis, “Modern motive power of the German Federal Railway: Part One”, in Trains Ilustrated, page 558: ↩

16. 2011 December 10, Marc Higginson, “Bolton 1 - 2 Aston Villa”, in BBC Sport ‎${}^{[2]}$: ↩

17. 1658, Edmund Waller, he Passion of Dido for Æneas: ↩

18. Alexander M[ansfield] Burrill (1850–1851), “BANK”, in A New Law Dictionary and Glossary: […], volume, New York, N.Y.: John S. Voorhies, […], →OCLC. ↩

19. Edward H[enry] Knight (1877), “Bank”, in Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary. […], volumes I (A–GAS), New York, N.Y.: Hurd and Houghton […], →OCLC. ↩

Link to original

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