What does "buck" mean?
Buck: The cloth or clothes soaked or washed. [Obs.] Shak.
Additional senses
- 2.To soak, steep, or boil, in lye or suds; -- a process in bleaching.
- 3.To wash (clothes) in lye or suds, or, in later usage, by beating them on stones in running water.
- 4.(Mining) To break up or pulverize, as ores.
- 5.The male of deer, especially fallow deer and antelopes, or of goats, sheep, hares, and rabbits. Note: A male fallow deer is called a fawn in his first year; a pricket in his second; a sorel in his third; a sore in his fourth; a buck of the first head in his fifth; and a great buck in his sixth. The female of the fallow deer is termed a doe. The male of the red deer is termed a stag or hart and not a buck, and the female is called a hind. Brande & C.
- 6.A gay, dashing young fellow; a fop; a dandy. The leading bucks of the day. Thackeray.
- 7.A male Indian or negro. [Colloq. U.S.] Note: The word buck is much used in composition for the names of antelopes; as, bush buck, spring buck. Blue buck. See under Blue. -- Water buck, a South African variety of antelope (Kobus ellipsiprymnus). See Illust. of Antelope.
- 8.To copulate, as bucks and does.
- 9.To spring with quick plunging leaps, descending with the fore legs rigid and the head held as low down as possible; -- said of a vicious horse or mule.
- 10.(Mil.) To subject to a mode of punishment which consists in tying the wrists together, passing the arms over the bent knees, and putting a stick across the arms and in the angle formed by the knees.
- 11.To throw by bucking. See Buck, v. i., 2. The brute that he was riding had nearly bucked him out of the saddle. W. E. Norris.
- 12.A frame on which firewood is sawed; a sawhorse; a sawbuck. Buck saw, a saw set in a frame and used for sawing wood on a sawhorse.
- 13.The beech tree. [Scot.] Buck mast, the mast or fruit of the beech tree. Johnson.
Sources
- Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 edition (public domain, via GCIDE / Project Gutenberg).
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- Published: 2026-07-17T00:00:00-07:00 · Modified: 2026-07-17T00:00:00-07:00