ack
ack Lexical Profile
ack Game Scores & Validity
• interjection
Used to express mild disgust, frustration, alarm, or dismay.
"Ack, I just spilled coffee all over my clean shirt!"
Used in digital, radio, or military communication to confirm that a message has been received and understood.
"Ack, I see the ticket and will start debugging the issue right away."
• noun
A signal or message sent between communicating processes, computers, or people to confirm the receipt of data or information.
"The server waited for an ack from the client before transmitting the next packet of data."
British A former phonetic alphabet code word representing the letter A, used in British military signaling prior to the adoption of the NATO phonetic alphabet.
"In early twentieth-century British radio procedure, the operator would say 'ack' to spell out the letter A."
• verb
To acknowledge the receipt of a network packet, alert, message, or software patch (especially in computing and engineering contexts).
"The on-call engineer quickly acked the system alert and began investigating the outage."
• Rhymes for ack
• Nearby Words
Word Origin & Etymology
As an interjection, 'ack' is imitative of a choking sound, popularized in the 1980s by Berkeley Breathed's comic strip Bloom County. In computing and telecommunications, it originates as an abbreviation of 'acknowledge' or 'acknowledgment', referring to the ASCII control character (ACK) used to confirm data receipt.