buck
Definitions
General English
Construction
- The wood or metal subframe of a door, installed in a wall to accommodate the finished frame.
- One of a pair of four-legged supporting devices used to hold wood as it is being sawed. See also sawbuck and doorbuck.
Forex
- (written as Buck)A term used commonly among Forex members to describe one million dollars.
Slang
- noun a dollar. A buckhorn knife handle was used apparently as a counter in 19th-century card games and ‘buckskins’ were earlier traded and used as a unit of exchange in North America.
- noun a young male gang member. A term adopted by British black youth and football hooligans from the street gangs of the USA, who themselves appropriated a word applied to young Red Indian braves.
Origin & History of “buck”
Old English had two related words which have coalesced into modern English buck: bucca ‘male goat’ and buc ‘male deer’. both go back to a prehistoric Germanic stem *buk-, and beyond that probably to an Indo-European source. The 18th-century meaning ‘dashing fellow’ probably comes ultimately from the related Old Norse bokki, a friendly term for a male colleague, which was originally adopted in English in the 14th century meaning simply ‘fellow’. The colloquial American sense ‘dollar’ comes from an abbreviation of buckskin, which was used as a unit of trade with the native Americans in Frontier days.
