tank
verb/tæŋk/
/tæŋk/
Verb Forms
Phrasal Verbs| present simple I / you / we / they tank | /tæŋk/ /tæŋk/ |
| he / she / it tanks | /tæŋks/ /tæŋks/ |
| past simple tanked | /tæŋkt/ /tæŋkt/ |
| past participle tanked | /tæŋkt/ /tæŋkt/ |
| -ing form tanking | /ˈtæŋkɪŋ/ /ˈtæŋkɪŋ/ |
- [intransitive] (informal) to decrease suddenly or fail completely
- The company's shares tanked on Wall Street.
- The reviews for the movie weren't great but no one thought that it would tank so spectacularly.
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- [transitive, intransitive] tank (something) (North American English, sport) to lose a game, especially deliberately
- She was accused of tanking the match.
Word Originearly 17th cent.: perhaps from Gujarati tānkũ or Marathi (a language spoken in the western Indian state of Maharashtra) tānke͂ ‘underground cistern’, from Sanskrit tadāga ‘pond’, probably influenced by Portuguese tangue ‘pond’, from Latin stagnum. The military vehicle took its name from the use of tank as a secret code word during manufacture in 1915.
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