Jenks

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A suburban city in eastern Oklahoma located near Tulsa ; a family name of English origin carried by many different people
2. A municipality in northeastern Oklahoma in the United States ; a surname passed down through English-speaking families
3. A small city just south of Tulsa in Oklahoma ; a hereditary family name borne by people in several English-speaking countries

Etymology: "Jenks" is a surname, and its story runs through a diminutive of a personal name. "Jenkin" is a pet form of "John" (in the same way "Hankin" and "Perkin" grew out of "Hank" and "Peter"), and English speakers later added the patronymic "-s" to turn a given name into a family name meaning "son of Jenkin." Over time the surname became more common than the name it came from, which is why the usual direction of borrowing has been reversed here. The word "jenks" is a back-formation. Speakers treated the surname as if it were a plural or a derived form and created the base "Jenkin" from it, when in fact the older pattern ran the other way: "Jenkin" came first and "Jenks" was built on top of it. That reversal is a small reminder that a word's apparent structure does not always reflect its real order of creation.