• hecc

• IPA^(key):/hɛk/

  • Audio(Southern England):

    (file)

• Rhymes:-ɛk

Late 19th century, originally dialectal northern English, from a euphemistic alteration ofhell.^[1][2]

heck

2. (euphemistic)Hell.

   Heck, what did I expect? It's too muddy out to go biking today.

heck (uncountable)

1. (euphemistic)Hell.

   You can go toheck as far as I'm concerned.

   • 2024 March 20, Richard Foster, “Vital experience in an open-air classroom”, inRAIL, number1005, page57:

     "And the railway industry needs aheck of a lot of people to be up-skilled," notes Darroch.

• Heck usually only replaceshell in idiomatic expressions or as a generic intensifier or vulgarity. It is only rarely, and for intentionally jocular effect, used as a euphemism for the actual concept of hell.

• See underhell.

Blend ofto heck(“destroyed, messed up”) +‎fuck, possibly supported byfeck.

heck (third-person singular simple presenthecks,present participlehecking,simple past and past participlehecked)(informal)

2. tobreak, todestroy

   Synonyms:fuck,bork

3. tomess up

• heck up

Seehatch(“a half door”).

• hack

heck (pluralhecks)

1. Thebolt orlatch of adoor.
2. Arack forcattle tofeed at.
3. (obsolete) A door, especially one partly oflatticework.
4. A latticework contrivance for catchingfish.
5. (weaving) An apparatus for separating the threads ofwarps into sets, as they are wound upon the reel from thebobbins, in a warping machine.

   Synonym:heck-box

6. Abend orwinding of astream.

• at heck and manger

• “heck”, inWebster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.:G. & C. Merriam,1913,→OCLC.
• William Dwight Whitney,Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “heck”, inThe Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.:The Century Co.,→OCLC.
• “heck”, inOneLook Dictionary Search.

• chek

• Audio:

  (file)

heck

1. singularimperative ofhecken
2. (colloquial)first-personsingularpresent ofhecken

heck

1. Alternative form ofhacche