heck meaning: definition, etymology and quotations

heck

intj

/hɛk/

Etymology Late 19th century, originally dialectal northern English, from a euphemistic alteration of hell.

Euphemistic Hell.

Heck, what did I expect? It's too muddy out to go biking today.

heck

noun

Etymology Late 19th century, originally dialectal northern English, from a euphemistic alteration of hell.

Euphemistic Hell.

You can go to heck as far as I'm concerned.
"And the railway industry needs a heck of a lot of people to be up-skilled," notes Darroch.2024 March 20, Richard Foster, “Vital experience in an open-air classroom”, in RAIL, number 1005, page 57:

Synonyms: under hell
Derived terms: 36 terms
as heck, bleeding heck, bloody heck, blooming heck, chuffing heck, for the heck of it, go to heck, hecka, heck board, heck-care, heckfire, heckhound, heck if I know, heckin', heckin, hecking, heck knows, heck no, heck of a, heckuva, heck yeah, heck yes, how the heck, like heck, oh my heck, scare the heck out of, snowball's chance in heck, the heck, the heck out of, to heck in a handbasket, what the heck, when heck freezes over, when the heck, where the heck, who the heck, why the heck

heck

verb

Etymology Possibly supported by feck.

Informal to break, to destroy

Informal to mess up

Derived terms: heck up

heck

noun

Etymology See hatch (“a half door”).

Informal The bolt or latch of a door.

Informal A rack for cattle to feed at.

Informal, Obsolete A door, especially one partly of latticework.

Informal A latticework contrivance for catching fish.

Business, Manufacturing, Textiles, Weaving Informal An apparatus for separating the threads of warps into sets, as they are wound upon the reel from the bobbins, in a warping machine.

Informal A bend or winding of a stream.

Derived terms: at heck and manger

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.