Words of the Day: Rack and Wrack, Wreak and Reek
These four words are all unpleasant, but each in its own way:
‘Rack‘ is the correct spelling for “I racked my brain.” It’s a torture metaphor. It implies that you’ve put your brain on a rack and stretched it to force it to reveal its secrets. Not a pretty picture.
‘Wrack‘ is a much rarer word. It’s closely associated with ‘wreck’, and originally involved ships. Today about the only place you’ll see it is in the set phrase ‘wrack and ruin’.
‘Wreak‘ technically only means “to inflict or bring about,” but its subject always involves destruction or something similar. ‘Wreak havoc’ is the most common usage in America, with ‘wreak vengeance’ a likely second. Past tense is ‘wreaked’, not ‘wrought’.
‘Reek‘ doesn’t involve destruction at all. It’s exclusively about foul odors.
Update: I forgot a much more common meaning for ‘wrack’, which appears in ‘wracked with pain’ or ‘a wracking cough’. In this sense, I’ve always spelled it with a ‘w’, but many people leave it off. Somebody here says that it’s wrong with the ‘w’, because that pulls it away from the torture metaphor. Google hits on parallel phrases run about even.
My completely unsupported intuition is that ‘wracked with pain’ doesn’t come from the torture metaphor. If ‘wracked’ in that phrase should be ‘rack’ and refer to torture, then the rest of the phrase is redundant. Torture already implies pain. The preposition is wrong, too: If you’re talking about torture, then ‘racked with’ is silly because there’s only one thing you can really rack with, and that’s a rack. It’s like using ‘hammer’ as a verb: You can only really hammer with a hammer.
To me, a wracking pain or a wracking cough suggest a full-body spasm that leaves the victim in a fetal position. Maybe that indicates that the sufferer would soon die, so he’s wrecked. Maybe it was a metaphor for a wooden ship being carried sidesways by a current into a rock and wrapping around it, which would be consistent with the nautical origin of ‘wrack’. I don’t know; I’m just guessing. But the image of someone being slowly stretched flat on a rack doesn’t fit with my feel for ‘wracked’ as a sudden, sharp pain that leaves the victim curled up in a helpless ball.