Word.ws English Dictionary

bank

UK/ˈbæŋk/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

British/ˈbaŋk/

bank noun: an institution where one can place and borrow money and take care of financial affairs.

bank: an institution where one can place and borrow money and take care of financial affairs
Image: Chongkian, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

bank (countable and uncountable, plural banks)

  1. (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...2013 June 1, “End of the peer show”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, page 71
  2. (countable) A branch office of such an institution.
    Synonyms:
    Lombard house
  3. (countable) An underwriter or controller of a card game.
    Synonyms:
    banker, banque
  4. (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.1625, Francis [Bacon], “Of Usury”, in The Essayes […], 3rd edition, London: […] Iohn Haviland for Hanna Barret, →OCLC
  5. (countable) The sum of money etc. which the dealer or banker has as a fund from which to draw stakes and pay losses.
  6. (slang, uncountable) Money; profit.
    • Military dude was working for a drug dealer, right? and making good bank with it—he was making good money.2010, Paul Bouchard, Enlistment, page 113
  7. (countable) In certain games, such as dominos, a fund of pieces from which the players are allowed to draw.
  8. (countable, in-compounds) A safe and guaranteed place of storage for and retrieval of important items or goods.
    • blood bank; data bank; sperm bank
  9. (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.
  10. (countable) A collection of instrument data on a digital synthesizer.
    • All of the drum kits are on bank 1.

Verb (1)

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

  1. (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 with1979, Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
  2. (transitive) To put into a bank (financial institution).
    • I’m going to bank the money.
  3. (transitive) To store in a bank (storage).
    • the procurement, banking or transplantation of cadaveric organs, eyes, or tissue2013 March, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, HIPAA Administrative Simplification
  4. (slang, transitive) To conceal in the rectum for use in prison.
    • Johnny banked some coke for me.
  5. (transitive) 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 (2)

bank (plural banks)

  1. An edge of river, lake, or other watercourse.
    • Tiber trembled underneath her banks.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]...
    • On the opposite bank of the river other Chinese units attacked Taoshih and Yunmeng north-west of Hankow.1943 June 8, “Jap Remnants Suffer Heavy Casualties: Alerts In Chungking”, in The Bombay Chronicle, volume XXXI, number 134, page 1
  2. An elevation under the sea; a shallow area of shifting sand, gravel, mud, and so forth
    • the banks of Newfoundland
    Synonyms:
    bar
  3. A slope of earth, sand, etc.; an embankment.
  4. The incline of an aircraft, especially during a turn.
  5. 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.1940 December, O. S. M. Raw, “The Rhodesia Railways—II”, in Railway Magazine, page 640
    • 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.2025 November 12, 'Mystery Shopper', “Is Devon the cream of the crop?”, in RAIL, number 1048, page 48
  6. A mass of clouds.
    • The bank of clouds on the horizon announced the arrival of the predicted storm front.
  7. The face of the coal at which miners are working.
  8. A deposit of ore or coal, worked by excavations above water level.
  9. The ground at the top of a shaft.
    • Ores are brought to bank.

Verb (2)

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

  1. (intransitive) To roll or incline laterally in order to turn.
  2. (transitive) To cause (an aircraft) to bank.
  3. (transitive) To form into a bank or heap, to bank up.
    • to bank sand
  4. (intransitive) To form a bank; to gather in masses.
    • […] clouds banking above the gravel road, their flat slate-blue bottoms threatening freezing rain or an early snowfall.2011 December 14, Sandra Birdsell, The Chrome Suite, Emblem Editions, →ISBN
    Synonyms:
    bank up
  5. (transitive) To cover the embers of a fire with ashes in order to retain heat.
  6. (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 ground1601, C[aius] Plinius Secundus [i.e., Pliny the Elder], “(please specify |book=I to XXXVII)”, in Philemon Holland, transl., The Historie of the World. Commonly Called, The Naturall Historie of C....
  7. (obsolete, transitive) To pass by the banks of.
    • Have I not heard these islanders shout out / Vive le roi! as I have banked their towns?c. 1595, William Shakespeare, King John, act 5, scene 2
  8. (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...1942 March, “Notes and News: Locomotive Notes”, in Railway Magazine, page 93
    • [...] 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.1960 July, “Motive Power Miscellany: Western Region”, in Trains Illustrated, page 443

Noun (3)

bank (plural banks)

  1. A row or panel of items stored or grouped together.
    • a bank of switches
    • a bank of pay phones
    Synonyms:
    line, rank, tier, grid, panel, block
  2. A row of keys on a musical keyboard or the equivalent on a typewriter keyboard.
  3. 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.
  4. (pinball) A set of multiple adjacent drop targets.

Verb (3)

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

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

Noun (4)

bank (plural banks)

  1. 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.1658, Edmund Waller, he Passion of Dido for Æneas
  2. A bench or seat for judges in court.
  3. 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 banc
  4. (archaic) A kind of table used by printers.
  5. A bench, or row of keys belonging to a keyboard, as in an organ.

Proper noun (1) capitalized: Bank

Bank

  1. A village in the New Forest in Hampshire, England.
  2. A major London Underground station in the City of London, named after the Bank of England and one of the busiest stations on the network (OS grid ref TQ3281)
    • Anybody familiar with the London Underground network will know that Bank Tube station is a place to be avoided - if at all possible - on a weekday morning. Located at the very heart of London's 'Square Mile' financial district, some 70,000 people detrain there during the morning peak, to pass...2019 October 23, Paul Stephen delivers a progress report on London Underground's transformative Bank Station capacity upgrade, Rail, page 68

Proper noun (2) capitalized: Bank

Bank (plural Banks)

  1. A surname.

bank meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

bank in Hindi

institution
बैंक baiṅk

bank in Tamil

institution
வங்கி vaṅki, வைப்பகம் vaippakam
storage for important goods
வங்கி vaṅki, வைப்பகம் vaippakam

bank in Marathi

institution
बँक bĕṅka
branch office
बँक bĕṅka

bank in Urdu

institution
بَینْک baiṅk, مَصْرِف masrif
More languagesFewer languages
bank in Bengali
ব্যাংক bêṅko
bank in Telugu
బ్యాంకు byāṅku
bank in Malayalam
ബാങ്ക് bāṅkŭ
bank in Kannada
ಬ್ಯಾಂಕ್ byāṅk, ದಡ daḍa
bank in Punjabi
ਬੈਂਕ baiṅk
bank in Gujarati
બેંક beṅk
bank in Odia
ବାଙ୍କ୍ bāṅk
bank in Sanskrit
धनागार dhanāgāra
bank in Sinhala
බැංකුව bæṁkuwa
bank in Assamese
বেংক beṅko
bank in Nepali
बैंक baiṅka
bank in Pashto
بانک bānk
bank in Tagalog
bangko
bank in Arabic
مَصْرِف maṣrif, بَنْك bank, ضِفَّة ḍiffa
bank in Malay
bank, tebing
bank in Indonesian
bank, gosong
bank in Persian
بَانْک bānk, بانْک bânk
bank in Thai
ธนาคาร tá-naa-kaan, กระปุกออมสิน grà-bpùk-ɔɔm-sǐn, ตลิ่ง dtà-lìng, ฝั่ง fàng
bank in Vietnamese
ngân hàng, nhà băng, bờ
bank in Myanmar
ဘဏ် bhan, ဘဏ်တိုက် bhantuik, ကမ်း kam:

Examples of bank in a sentence

  • 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.2013 June 1, “End of the peer show”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, page 71:
  • 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.2014 September 16, Ian Jack, “Is this the end of Britishness”, in The Guardian:
  • 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.1960 September, P. Ransome-Wallis, “Modern motive power of the German Federal Railway: Part One”, in Trains Ilustrated, page 558:
  • 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.2011 December 10, Marc Higginson, “Bolton 1 - 2 Aston Villa”, in BBC Sport:

All 40 example sentences with bank

Synonyms of bank

1 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of bank

Forms of bank

Noun
pluralbanks
alternative form (obsolete)banck
alternative form (obsolete)bancke
alternative form (obsolete)banke
Verb
third-person singular presentbanks
present participlebanking
past participlebanked
pastbanked
Proper noun
pluralBanks

Past tense of bank: banked

Plural of bank: banks

Origin of bank

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).

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”).

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

Words formed from bank

Phrases with bank

155 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with bank

34 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about bank

What does bank mean?
Bank means an institution where one can place and borrow money and take care of financial affairs.
What is bank in Hindi?
Bank in Hindi is बैंक (baiṅk). See Bank meaning in Hindi.
How do you use bank in a sentence?
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.
What part of speech is bank?
Bank can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce bank?
Bank is pronounced /ˈbæŋk/ (UK).
What is the plural of bank?
The plural of bank is banks.

Words near bank in the dictionary

  1. banjuke
  2. banjukes
  3. Banjul
  4. banjulele
  5. banjuleles
  6. bank
  7. bank account
  8. bank accounts
  9. bank balance
  10. bank balances
  11. bank beaver

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bank (page history and authors); Bank (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-bank.ogg.

Cite this entry: “bank.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bank. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.