hunker

1. 1.

   sit on one's heels

   “In some cultures, the women give birth while squatting”

   “The children hunkered down to protect themselves from the sandstorm”

   Synonymssquatcrouchscrunchscrunch uphunker down

   Broadersit

Other forms of hunker

past tense

hunkerred·

present participle

hunkerring·

third person

hunkers·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about hunker

What does hunker mean?

hunker means "sit on one's heels".

How many syllables are in hunker?

hunker has 2 syllables: hun-ker. The stress falls on "hun". In IPA it is /ˈhʌŋkɚ/.

What is another word for hunker?

Close synonyms include squat, crouch, scrunch, scrunch up, hunker down. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is hunker a common word?

hunker is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.