Word.ws English Dictionary

bonk

UK/bɒŋk//bɑŋk/

bonk verb: to hit or strike; to collide with something.

Verb

bonk (third-person singular simple present bonks, present participle bonking, simple past and past participle bonked)

  1. (informal) To hit or strike; to collide with something.
    • Please let it be the cow. No such luck, The 'cow' picked up my big brass telescope and bonked me on the head with it.1983, Bill Oddie, Gone Birding, London: Methuen, page 57
  2. (UK, ambitransitive, informal) To have sexual intercourse (with).
    • Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge) What is a proper relationship?
      Louise (Lesley Sharp): Living with someone who talks to you after they've bonked ya.1993, Mike Leigh, Naked
    • Because most of the blokes I fancy think l'm stupid and pointless—and, so, they just bonk me and then leave me. And the kind of blokes that do fancy me, I think are drips. I can't even be bothered to bonk them. Which does sort of leave me a bit nowhere.1994, Richard Curtis, Four Weddings and a Funeral, spoken by Scarlett (Charlotte Coleman)
  3. To hit something with the front of the board, especially in midair.
  4. (informal) To experience sudden and severe fatigue in an endurance sports event due to glycogen depletion.
    • I had eaten five of my six PowerBars. I was exhausted and famished. In cycling they describe what was happening to me as bonking: my body was out of fuel and had no more energy.2004, Gary Erickson, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Raising the Bar, Jossey-Bass, →ISBN, page 29
    Synonyms:
    hit the wall

Noun

bonk (countable and uncountable, plural bonks)

  1. (countable, informal) A bump on the head.
  2. (countable, informal) Any minor collision or blow.
  3. (UK, countable, informal) An act of sexual intercourse.
    • “[…] It’s not like I’m just looking for a bonk, is it? This is something a bit different.” ¶ “Quite,” said Nick—though bonk was a troublingly casual way of referring to something which preoccupied him so much.2004, Alan Hollinghurst, chapter 2, in The Line of Beauty […], London: Picador, →ISBN
  4. (informal, uncountable) A condition of sudden, severe fatigue in an endurance sports event caused by glycogen depletion.
  5. (countable) An animal call resembling "bonk", such as the call of the pobblebonk.

Proper noun capitalized: Bonk

Bonk (plural Bonks)

  1. A surname.

Synonyms of bonk

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of bonk

Forms of bonk

Verb
third-person singular presentbonks
present participlebonking
past participlebonked
pastbonked
Noun
pluralbonks
Proper noun
pluralBonks

Past tense of bonk: bonked

Origin of bonk

Of imitative origin. Compare English bang, bounce, bump.

Possibly from Polish Bonk.

Words formed from bonk

Phrases with bonk

Words that rhyme with bonk

5 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about bonk

What does bonk mean?
Bonk means to hit or strike; to collide with something.
What part of speech is bonk?
Bonk can be a verb, a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce bonk?
Bonk is pronounced /bɒŋk/ (UK).
What is the past tense of bonk?
The past tense of bonk is bonked.

Words near bonk in the dictionary

  1. bonjour
  2. bonjour/hi
  3. bonjoured
  4. bonjouring
  5. Bonjours
  6. bonk
  7. bonk bag
  8. bonk bags
  9. bonk ban
  10. bonk bans
  11. bonk-on

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bonk (page history and authors); Bonk (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-bonk.ogg.

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