Ark

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ɑːk/

Definitions

1. A large vessel built to save animals and people from a flood ; a box or chest used to store or protect valuables or sacred objects
2. An enormous boat designed to preserve life during catastrophic floods ; a container intended for keeping important items safe and secure
3. A huge ship constructed to rescue living creatures from a global deluge ; a storage chest for holding precious or holy possessions

Etymology: The word "ark" has two unrelated histories that happen to share a spelling. The one for the rescue boat is the less famous and more modest of the two. It is a shortening of "arky" or "arc" in a sense of "boat", and the boat sense is tied to the same Latin root as the Biblical vessel. The more familiar Noah's Ark is itself the older and more prominent use, so the rescue sense is best understood as a later extension of the same basic idea of a box or chest that holds and protects its contents. That shared idea runs back to Latin "arca", meaning chest or coffer, which in turn comes from "arceō", meaning "to enclose" or "to keep off". A chest is something that encloses its contents, and a boat that carries people through danger is the same kind of protective enclosure afloat. The Old English "ærc" entered the picture as an early borrowing of the Latin word for a box, and it carried over into the Biblical sense of Noah's vessel.

Synonyms: boat, vessel, craft