Word.ws English Dictionary

hunker

UK/ˈhʌŋkə//ˈhʌŋkɚ/

hunker verb: to crouch or squat close to the ground or lie down.

hunker: to crouch or squat close to the ground or lie down
Image: Kucharek, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Verb

hunker (third-person singular simple present hunkers, present participle hunkering, simple past and past participle hunkered)

  1. (intransitive) To crouch or squat close to the ground or lie down.
    • Get out of the mobile home and hunker in a ditch2020 March 3, “Tornado Safety”, in WHAS-TV, archived from the original on 03 Apr 2023
    Synonyms:
    crouch, squat, lie
  2. (intransitive) To apply oneself to a task.

Noun

hunker (plural hunkers)

  1. (dated) A political conservative.

Proper noun capitalized: Hunker

Hunker (plural Hunkers)

  1. A surname

hunker meaning in Tamil

hunker in Tamil

பதுங்குதல்

Synonyms of hunker

Forms of hunker

Verb
third-person singular presenthunkers
present participlehunkering
past participlehunkered
pasthunkered
Noun
pluralhunkers
Proper noun
pluralHunkers

Past tense of hunker: hunkered

Origin of hunker

Originally Scottish. Origin uncertain, but probably of Germanic origin, perhaps *hunk- a nasalised variant of *huk- (compare Scots hoonk, hounk, variants of huk, hok (“to squat, crouch”); Scots hocker (“to crouch down, hunker”)), all of North Germanic origin, from Old Norse huka (“to crouch”), from Proto-Germanic *hūkan- (“to squat”), from *hūkkan-, back-formed from the iterative *huk(k)ōn-, from Proto-Indo-European *kuk-néh₂, from *kewk- (“to curve, bend”) (also the source of high). Probable cognates include Old Norse húka, Dutch huiken, and German hocken.

Unknown

Words formed from hunker

Words that rhyme with hunker

Questions about hunker

What does hunker mean?
Hunker means to crouch or squat close to the ground or lie down.
What is hunker in Tamil?
Hunker in Tamil is பதுங்குதல். See Hunker meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is hunker?
Hunker can be a verb, a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce hunker?
Hunker is pronounced /ˈhʌŋkə/ (UK).
What is the past tense of hunker?
The past tense of hunker is hunkered.

Words near hunker in the dictionary

  1. Hunipui
  2. Hunjiang
  3. hunk
  4. hunk of junk
  5. hunkdom
  6. hunker
  7. hunker down
  8. hunkered
  9. hunkered down
  10. hunkerer
  11. hunkerers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hunker (page history and authors); Hunker (page history and authors); hunker (Tamil Wiktionary) (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-hunker.ogg.

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