Tronk

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A prison. South-Africa

    "It must here be explained that the tronk, or jail, is the general receptacle, not only of convicted criminals, but of such Hottentots or slaves as are found, improperly or illegally wandering about the country […]"

Synonyms

All synonyms
bincalaboosejail

Example

More examples

"It must here be explained that the tronk, or jail, is the general receptacle, not only of convicted criminals, but of such Hottentots or slaves as are found, improperly or illegally wandering about the country […]"

Etymology

Borrowed from Afrikaans tronk, from Dutch tronk, from Portuguese tronco, from Latin truncus. Doublet of truncus and trunk.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.