anker
USANG-ker/ˈæŋ.kɚ/UKANG-kuh/ˈæŋ.kə/
Pluralankers
- 1A cask holding 10 gallons of wine or spirits, or that quantity used as a unit of measure.
Each anker of spirits was taxed heavily before it left the port.
[I]t is quite a painful reflection how many whole crews we have made to walk the plank for no more than a stock of biscuit or an anker or two of spirit.
1889, Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Master’s Wanderings”Note
English took this cask-name from Dutch anker, a doublet of anchor, and the two stay close enough that Smollett, in 1751, writes "a few anchors of right Nantz." Stevenson's pirates in The Master of Ballantrae (1889) reckon spirit by the anker, and C. S. Forester still reaches for it in 1938. Today it belongs to period and seafaring fiction, usually in small counts: an anker of brandy, an anker or two of spirit.
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Origin
From Dutch "anker." It is a doublet of "anchor" and "ancora."