Word of the Day

: February 3, 2018

tucket

noun TUCK-ut

What It Means

: a fanfare on a trumpet

tucket in Context

"By this time the tucket was sounding cheerily in the morning, and from all sides Sir Daniel's men poured into the main street and formed before the inn." — Robert Louis Stevenson, The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, 1888

"… Leonard Bernstein came on to lead a thunderous performance of 'Fanfare for the Common Man,' a series of ear-blasting tuckets and bass-drum explosions that Mr. Copland wrote in 1943...." — Donal Henahan, The New York Times, 15 Nov. 1985

Did You Know?

Tucket can be found most notably in the stage directions of several of William Shakespeare's plays. In King Lear, for example, a tucket sounds to alert the Earl of Gloucester of the arrival of the Duke of Cornwall (Act II, Scene i). The word tucket likely derives from the obsolete English verb tuk, meaning "to beat the drum" or "to sound the trumpet." These days, the word fanfare itself refers to a sounding of trumpets made, for example, in celebration or to alert one of another's arrival. The presence of fanfare might be the reason that tucket is rarely used in contemporary English.