‘Saw wrack is the main seaweed used, taken fresh from the shore, washed in seawater and stored briefly.’ ‘We are still finding out where wig wrack grows, we have 70+ confirmed sites in Scotland so far and four in Northern Ireland.’.
Which is the correct usage: 'rack my brain' or 'wrack my brain'? Google turned up pages with conflicting recommendations.is that to 'rack a brain' comes from the.is that wrack means damage or destruction or punishment and thus is correct.Since I'm a SE user I'm inclined to immediately discount the second opinion from Yahoo Answers, but the logic seems plausible enough that I wanted to be sure.On a related note, if rack is indeed correct, does the song simply have an ungrammatical title or is the error intentional?
The says that the phrase could use either wrack or rack. They note thatThe relationship between the forms rack and wrack is complicated. The most common noun sense of rack, ‘a framework for holding and storing things’, is always spelled rack, never wrack. In the phrase rack something up the word is also always spelled rack. Figurative senses of the verb, deriving from the type of torture in which someone is stretched on a rack, can, however, be spelled either rack or wrack: thus racked with guilt; or wracked with guilt; rack your brains; or wrack your brains.However, according to this, the term should be rack:The verb meaning 'to ruin or wreck' (originally of ships) is recorded from 1560s, from earlier intrans. Sense 'to be shipwrecked' (late 15c.).
Often confused in this sense since 16c. With rack (1) in the verb sense of 'to torture on the rack;' to wrack one's brains is thus erroneous.The agrees that the phrase is rack your brains, adding:The rack was a mediaeval torture device. The crude but, one presumes, effective racks often tore the victim's limbs from their bodies. It isn't surprising that 'rack' was adopted as a verb meaning to cause pain and anguish. Shakespeare was one of many authors who used this.Further, this book on says it should be rack:If you are racked with pain or you feel nerve-racked, you are feeling as if you were being stretched on that Medieval instrument of torture, the rack.
You rack your brains when you stretch them vigorously to search out the truth like a torturer. “Wrack” has to do with ruinous accidents, so if the stock market is wracked by rumors of imminent recession, it’s wrecked. If things are wrecked, they go to “wrack and ruin.”The agrees it should be rack as well.That being said, there is some use of wrack your brains (blue line) as shown by this. However, rack your brains is correct and more common:There is some disagreement, but more sources say it should be rack. Thus it seems more likely that the phrase is rack your brains instead of wrack.
Wrackis roughly synonymous with wreck. As a noun, it refers to destruction or wreckage. As a verb, it means to wreck. It is now mostly an archaic word, preserved mainly in a few common phrases.
Rackhas many definitions, but the one that makes it easily confused with wrack is to torture. This sense comes from the use of medieval torture devices—called racks—on which victims’ bodies were painfully stretched. So, figuratively speaking, to rack something is to torture it, especially in manner that resembles stretching.
Common rack/wrack phrases
Rack [one’s] brain
Rack [one’s] brain is one common phrase in which rack in the torture-related sense is figuratively extended. To rack one’s brain is to torture it or to stretch it by thinking very hard.
To wrack one’s brain would be to wreck it. This might sort of make sense in some figurative uses, but rack is the standard spelling where the phrase means to think very hard. Wrack [one’s] brain is so common, though, that we have no choice but to consider it an accepted variant (some dictionaries agree with this).
Nerve-racking
In the phrasal adjectivenerve-racking, rack is again used in the sense meaning to torture. Something that is nerve-racking tortures the nerves or figuratively stretches them.
Wrack, again, makes some sense, though. We can think of nerve-wracking as meaning wrecking the nerves instead of torturing the nerves, in which case the spelling is perfectly justifiable. But this doesn’t change the fact that nerve-racking is the original form, the more common one, and the one that is generally preferred in edited writing, for what that’s worth. Airline fantasy class guide.
Wrack and ruin
The one common phrase in which wrack undoubtedly makes more sense is wrack and ruin, which is just an emphatic, somewhat archaic-sounding way of saying wreckage or ruin or, in other words, great destruction.
Rack up
It’s hard to imagine a context in which wrack up would make sense. Rack up has several definitions, including (1) to accumulate, and (2) to prepare billiard balls for the start of a game.