nook
Pluralnooks
Pluralnooks
- 1A small corner formed where two walls meet, or a small recess in a room.
The kitchen has a breakfast nook with a built-in bench under the window.
An old armchair filled the nook beneath the slanted attic ceiling.
Note
The word has always been about angles: Middle English noke meant a corner, and though its origin is uncertain, it may go back to an Old English word for a hook or angle, from a root meaning "a bend". Indoors it often names a corner given a use, as in a breakfast nook, and it is the homelier word beside alcove and recess.
- 2
- 3A recess or hollow in the land, or a small sheltered cove along a shore.
Ferns grew thickly in the shady nooks along the stream bank.
The fishing boats rode out the gale in a narrow nook of the coast.
Similarniche
Note
Shakespeare's Tempest uses it for a sheltered inlet: Ariel reports the King's ship safe in harbor "in the deep nook" where Prospero once called him up at midnight to fetch dew. Outdoors the word keeps its sense of an angle that shelters, whether a hollow in a bank, a niche in rock or a bend of the coast.
- 4To withdraw into a nook, tucking oneself away in a corner.
The two old friends nooked by the fire, talking long after the other guests had gone.
Guests who wanted to escape the music could nook in the little library off the hall.
Similarnestle
Note
Used of people, it often comes with with and a hint of privacy: a character in the play Aunt Jeannie complains, "Half the time you were nooking with Daisy." The passive works too, as when Mrs. Fluent "was nooked with their hostess" in a corner in Alban: A Tale of the New World. In Alice Clayton's Rusty Nailed (2014) the privacy turns plainly romantic: "We laughed, we loved, we nooked."
- 5To place something in a nook, fitting it into a corner or recess.
A small washroom had been nooked into the space beneath the staircase.
Designers of small apartments like to nook storage into every spare corner.
Note
It is mostly met in the passive with into: pantries cleverly nooked into alcoves, hives nooked into the very walls of a city. The word suggests a snug, deliberate fit, something tucked rather than merely put, and it belongs to descriptive, slightly literary prose.
- 6A former English unit of land area, first a quarter of a yardland and later 12½ or 20 acres.
The manor records show that each tenant held a nook of land in the open fields.
Nook, an old legal term for 12+¹⁄₂ acres of land; still in use at Alston.
1903, English Dialectical Dictionary, volume IVNote
Old land law built its measures by doubling: two fardels made a nook, and two nooks made half a yard of land. The acreage drifted from place to place, 12½ in some records and 20 in others, and in 1903 the term was still in use at Alston. The Economist enjoyed the clash with the cozy corner in 1968: this nook, it noted, covered 20 acres.
Less common meaning
- 7A corner of a piece of land, or an angled piece of land, especially one jutting into neighboring land.
The parish boundary ran along the old wall as far as the east nook of the moor.
A narrow nook of pasture ran between the two farms, and both families claimed it.
Note
In the boundary records of the north of England the word is often spelled nuke, and it marks the corners a boundary turns on: the east nuke of the Carter, Plumpton park nuke. Some of these corners became names in their own right, run together as in Spittopnuke. Modern writing would say corner or angle of land.
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Practice
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Origin
From Middle English noke, nok (“nook, corner, angle”), of uncertain origin. It is perhaps from Old English hnoc, hnocc (“hook, angle”), from Proto-Germanic *hnukkaz (“a bend”), in which case it is related to Danish nok (“hook”), Icelandic hnokki (“hook”) and Dutch nok (“ridge”); it is also cognate with Scots neuk (“corner”).