Word.ws English Dictionary

speck

/spɛk/

speck noun: a tiny spot or particle, especially of dirt.

Noun (1)

speck (plural specks)

  1. A tiny spot or particle, especially of dirt.
    • a tiny speck of soot
    • Matvey was already holding up the shirt like a horse’s collar, and, blowing off some invisible speck, he slipped it with obvious pleasure over the well-groomed body of his master.1901 [1878], Constance Garnett, transl., Anna Karenina, translation of Анна Каренина (Anna Karenina) by Leo Tolstoy
  2. A very small amount; a particle; a whit.
    • He has not a speck of money.
    • not a speck of truth in her story.
  3. A small etheostomoid fish, Etheostoma stigmaeum, common in the eastern United States.

Verb

speck (third-person singular simple present specks, present participle specking, simple past and past participle specked)

  1. (transitive) To mark with specks; to speckle.
    • paper specked by impurities in the water used in its manufacture
    • Each flower of slender stalk, whose head though gay / Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold, / Hung drooping unsustained, […]1667, John Milton, “(please specify the page number)”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker...

Noun (2)

speck (uncountable)

  1. Fat; lard; fat meat.
  2. A juniper-flavoured ham originally from Tyrol.
  3. The blubber of whales or other marine mammals.
  4. The fat of the hippopotamus.

Proper noun capitalized: Speck

Speck (plural Specks)

  1. A surname from German.

speck meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Urdu and Bengali

speck in Hindi

speck, particle, atom
कण kaṇ

speck in Tamil

தூசு

speck in Urdu

چتی, داغ, نقطہ, پھٹکی, ذرہ

speck in Bengali

ছোটো দাগ, কণা
More languagesFewer languages
speck in Malayalam
തരി tari
speck in Kannada
ಚುಕ್ಕೆ cukke
speck in Punjabi
ਡੱਬ ḍabba
speck in Gujarati
સ્પેક
speck in Sanskrit
कण kaṇa
speck in Pashto
ټکی ṭəkay
speck in Persian
کوچولو, کَمَکْ

Examples of speck in a sentence

  • When the national grid suffers its next huge outage, as it did in July 2012 when hundreds of millions were left in the dark, look for specks of light in the villages.2013 July 20, “Out of the gloom”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845:
  • Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.1994, Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, →ISBN:
  • Join'd to Theſe [birds], / Thouſands beſide, thick as the covering Leaves / VVhich ſpeck them o'er, their Modulations mix / Mellifluous.1728, [James] Thomson, Spring. A Poem, […] A[ndrew] Millar, […]; and G[eorge] Strahan, […], →OCLC, pages 30–31:

All 36 example sentences with speck

Synonyms of speck

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of speck

Forms of speck

Noun
pluralspecks
Verb
third-person singular presentspecks
present participlespecking
past participlespecked
pastspecked
Proper noun
pluralSpecks

Plural of speck: specks

Origin of speck

From Middle English spekke, from Old English specca (“small spot, stain”), from the same ultimate source as Proto-Germanic *sprakô (“spark”). Cognate with Low German spaken (“to spot with wet”).

From earlier specke, spycke (probably reinforced by Dutch spek, German Speck), from Middle English spik, spyk, spike, spich, from Old English spic (“bacon; lard; fat”), from Proto-West Germanic *spik, from Proto-Germanic *spiką (“bacon”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian Späk, Dutch spek, German Speck, Icelandic spik.

* As a German surname, from the noun Speck (“bacon”). * As an English surname, variant of Speake, and perhaps a variant of Peck with an initial -s.

Words formed from speck

Words that rhyme with speck

44 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about speck

What does speck mean?
Speck means a tiny spot or particle, especially of dirt.
What is speck in Hindi?
Speck in Hindi is कण (kaṇ). See Speck meaning in Hindi.
How do you use speck in a sentence?
When the national grid suffers its next huge outage, as it did in July 2012 when hundreds of millions were left in the dark, look for specks of light in the villages.
What part of speech is speck?
Speck can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce speck?
Speck is pronounced /spɛk/.
What is the plural of speck?
The plural of speck is specks.

Words near speck in the dictionary

  1. speciousnesses
  2. SPECIs
  3. specism
  4. specist
  5. specists
  6. speck
  7. specked
  8. speckeldy
  9. specker
  10. speckie
  11. speckier

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: speck (page history and authors); Speck (page history and authors); कण (Hindi) (page history and authors); speck (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); speck (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); speck (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); തരി (Malayalam) (page history and authors); ಚುಕ್ಕೆ (Kannada) (page history and authors); ਡੱਬ (Punjabi) (page history and authors); speck (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); ټکی (Pashto) (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.

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

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