Talk:spank

Could it be from Portuguese pt:espancar ? It has a similar meaning. Soap (talk) 01:46, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

This has been in my mind for more than ten years now. Im just answering myself, for the sake of anyone else who might also be wondering .... i think it's unlikely, as the verb is attested in english with its modern sense dating back to the 1700s, when we took very few loans from Portuguese, and most of those we took were cultural words like the names of foods and animals. a loan for a general vocabulary word is unlikely. —Soap— 12:33, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

OED says there are two spanks

i cant get to the site but OED says that there are actually 2 verbs "spank" and they might have two separate etymologies. both are quite old and thus the "spanking along" might have a long tradiiton of use rather than being derived as slang from the more common sense. —Soap— 11:41, 18 September 2023 (UTC)