How can words mean so many things? A fellow logophile told me that "wrack" means "seaweed". Doubting her, I looked it up in dictionary.com and found 16 entries for the word--and about as many meanings. It seems to have a Scandanavian etymology, though my friend says that the "seaweed" definition possibly comes from a French word, "vraic", meaning seaweed.

Some other meanings of "wrack" that were new to me are: pair of antlers, a 4-beat gait of a horse, draining wine from dregs.

How are we supposed to keep them all straight???

Besides being derived from "vraic" it is also derived from a middle-Dutch word "rec" meaning "framework"; an Old Provencal word, "raca", meaning grapes (thus the draining of wine meaning); and a Skandanavian word, "rak", meaning wreckage.

Question: What do you say to an attractive female moose?
Answer: "Hey, nice wrack!"

(Yes, Yes R.E., I know. Female moose ["mooses"? "meese"? "moosium??] don't have antlers. Or maybe they do, I don't care. It was just a joke.)

According to Guinness, the word "set" or "sett" has over 150 different meanings .

Richard English

That's right, Richard--now I remember your mentioning that before. While I have already learned on this board that English has more words than any other language, it seems strange to me to have such a wide variety of meanings for a word. When the person mentioned "wrack" as meaning "seaweed", I was just stumped.

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When the person mentioned "wrack" as meaning "seaweed", I was just stumped.

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Interesting. If I were asked, that is about the only definition of "wrack" that I could give. There is also the more metaphorical meaning of cloud shaped like seaweed, I suppose.