Word.ws English Dictionary

tronk

tronk noun: a prison.

Noun

tronk (plural tronks)

  1. (South Africa) A prison.
    • It must here be explained that the tronk, or jail, is the general receptacle, not only of convicted criminals, but of such Hottentots or slaves as are found, improperly or illegally wandering about the country […]1824, William John Burchell, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa
    • The diary of another settler, who had been wrongfully imprisoned in the Tronk, and described the daily life there in no uncertain terms […]1958, Isobel Rae, The strange story of Dr James Barry

Forms of tronk

pluraltronks

Origin of tronk

Borrowed from Afrikaans tronk, from Dutch tronk, from Portuguese tronco, from Latin truncus. Doublet of truncus and trunk.

Questions about tronk

What does tronk mean?
Tronk means a prison.
What part of speech is tronk?
Tronk is a noun.
What is the plural of tronk?
The plural of tronk is tronks.

Words near tronk in the dictionary

  1. trones
  2. Trong
  3. Trongsa
  4. tronie
  5. tronies
  6. tronk
  7. tronks
  8. Tronna
  9. trons
  10. troo
  11. troodontid

Source and license

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