block – English noun declension

English noun forms of block

Noun: block
Singularblock
Pluralblocks

Sample Sentences

  • a block of ice; a block of stone
  • She picked up the block and examined it.
  • Anne Boleyn placed her head on the block and awaited her execution.
  • You young porkers who are sitting in front of me, every one of you will scream your lives out at the block within a year. [1943 November – 1944 February (date written; published 1945 August 17), George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], Animal Farm […], London: Secker & Warburg, published May 1962, →OCLC:]
  • Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade’s bill; using, however, my comrade’s money. [1851 November 14, Herman Melville, “chapter 13”, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC:]
  • He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat; it ever changes with the next block. [1598–1599 (first performance), William Shakespeare, “Much Adoe about Nothing”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i]:]
  • She said, 'I hope I shall not be left to kill myself, but It would be no more sin to kill me, than to put a block on the fire.' [1833, The Gospel Anchor, volume 2, page 371:]
  • "Aye," said the farmer putting another block on the fire as he spoke […] [1803, Mary Tighe, Selena:]
  • Dawn and Shorty would cut this tree into blocks, while Randy and Matt went back for more. Dawn and Shorty made a good team on the crosscut, so when another log arrived, the first was almost completely made into shake wood. [2012, Ron Herrett, Shorty's Story:]
  • a block of 100 tickets
  • But there are many queen bee configurations in which the debris is neutralized, including placement of a block or eater near the bee's turnaround point, or placing two queen bees in a line or at right angles in various positions and phases. [1989 October 31, Scott Huddleston, “life: glider guns”, in comp.theory.cell-automata (Usenet):]
  • Perhaps the simplest puffer known is the following period 20 puffer based on the period 20 spaceship, which creates blocks. [1997 November 30, David Bell, “Day & Night - An Interesting Variant of Life (part 5/5)”, in comp.theory.cell-automata (Usenet):]
  • Blocks have a couple of unusual properties: they are cleanly destroyed by an incoming glider on any one of six adjacent paths, and none of the possible collisions include any output gliders, so you can't get chain reactions. [2005 February 23, Dave Greene, “exist glider gun able of reconstruction in Life?”, in comp.theory.cell-automata (Usenet):]
  • a block of text; a block of colour; a block of land
  • a block of data; a block of seven days; a block reservation
  • The great game of golf offered an antidote to the inevitable dead space — blocks of difficult-to-use hours, pre- and postflight — that are one of business travel’s biggest drags. [2007 September 4, John Berg, “Time on the Greens Beats Time at the Gate”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 10 Jan 2021:]
  • After one disk is mapped, the next block starts at address 0 on the next disk. [2003, Dilip M. Ranade, Shared Data Clusters, page 79:]
  • The difficulty of each puzzle would increase as the number of miners increased, which would keep production to one block of transactions roughly every 10 minutes. In addition, the size of each block bounty would halve every 210,000 blocks—first from 50 bitcoins to 25, then from 25 to 12.5, and so on. Around the year 2140, the currency would reach its preordained limit of 21 million bitcoins. [2011 November 23, Benjamin Wallace, “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin”, in Wired, San Francisco, Calif.: Condé Nast Publications, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 02 Jan 2025:]
  • With a foreach block, you don't need to create an explicit counter variable. [2006, Matthew MacDonald, Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 in C# 2005: From Novice to Professional, page 49:]
  • The "Specials" block comprises the sixteen codepoints from U+FFF0 through U+FFFF.
  • I’m going for a walk around the block.
  • The place you are looking for is two long blocks east and one short block north.
  • The Witness: Well, I have one that is 8/10 of a mile away; I have one that is just about another 8/10 of a mile away; I have one that is three blocks away; I have one that is four blocks away; I have one that is eight blocks away, and I have one that is about 14 blocks away. [1832, Records and Briefs of the United States Supreme Court, page 423:]
  • This uphill trail is like a battlefield. Anne offers to carry the older woman's backpack. […] I couldn't walk three blocks with the Danish woman's bulging backpack. [2009, Hape Kerkeling, I'm Off Then, page 241:]
  • A county courthouse and a municipal building, located approximately a city block north of the district, were automatically excluded because they were separated from the main CBD by several blocks that did not reach either of the required index values. [2017, Raymond E. Murphy, The Central Business District, page 37:]
  • a block of flats; a tower block; an office block; a toilet block; a shower block
  • He turned back to the scene before him and the enormous new block of council dwellings. The design was some way after Corbusier but the block was built up on plinths and resembled an Atlantic liner swimming diagonally across the site. [1963, Margery Allingham, “Foreword”, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC:]
  • There’s a block in the pipe that means the water can’t get through.
  • I work with writers/artists/others using artistic skills as a tool to explore blocks and free creative energy. [1977 April 1, “COUNSELING (personal advertisement)”, in Gay Community News, page 14:]
  • a mental block
  • writer’s block
  • The match proved an unedifying spectacle until Spurs won a corner following their first move of real quality, John Mensah making an important block with Jermain Defoe poised to strike. [2011 February 12, Oliver Brett, “Sunderland 1–2 Tottenham”, in BBC:]
  • While it might seem like she should bend her elbows in order to spring up — the way you bend your knees in order to jump — a good block actually requires the gymnast to keep her arms straight and use her shoulder strength to launch into the air. [2024 July 27, Maggie Astor, “Your Guide to Olympic Gymnastics: Vault”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 31 Jul 2024:]
  • The Wiktionary page-blanking vandal was hit with an indefinite block.
  • I’ve put a block on calls from that number.
  • I’ll knock your block off!
  • What a block art thou! [c. 1590–1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene v]:]

Etymology

From Middle English blok (“log, stump, solid piece”), from Old French bloc (“log, block”), from Middle Dutch blok (“treetrunk”), from Old Dutch *blok (“log”), from Proto-West Germanic *blokk, from Proto-Germanic *blukką (“beam, log”), from Proto-Indo-European *bʰelǵ- (“thick plank, beam, pile, prop”). Cognate with Old Frisian blok, Old Saxon blok, Old High German bloh, bloc (“block”), Old English bolca (“gangway of a ship, plank”), Old Norse bǫlkr (“divider, partition”). More at balk. See also bloc, bulk. See: Middle English Nouns 'blok', Old English Nouns 'bolca', Old Norse Nouns 'bǫlkr'.

Verbs referencing "block"

English Nouns bloke, German Nouns Block, Irish Nouns bloc, Danish Nouns blok, Norwegian Bokmål Nouns blokk, Norwegian Nynorsk Nouns blokk, French Nouns bloc-heater.