alec

¹

[al-ik]

noun

Obsolete.

1. a herring.

2. a sauce or relish made from small herring or anchovies.

alec

²

[al-ik]

noun

Australian.

1. a simpleton or fool.

Alec

³

Or Al·eck

[al-ik]

noun

1. a first name, form of Alexander.

Word History and Origins

Origin of alec¹

1510–20; < Latin ( h ) al ( l ) ec fish sauce

Origin of alec²

1920–25; smart aleck ( def. ); sense shift perhaps originally from ironic usage

Example Sentences

Zapata is accused of driving a stolen Hyundai sports utility vehicle and colliding with a police cruiser that was being driven by 28-year-old Alec Sanders, an officer with the Alhambra Police Department.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

Alhambra Police Chief Garrett Kennedy identified the officer as 28-year-old Alec Sanders during a news conference outside the Los Angeles General Medical Center, where the officer was taken following the crash.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

A young, trim Alec Baldwin, channeling John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever” and the Brando-Dean example that paved the way, plays a male-chauvinist heel with charming, hedonistic commitment.

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“We thought we were going to tank that movie. If we did something that looked terrible, we wouldn’t be here talking about it nearly 40 years later,” said visual-effects and creature-design veteran Alec Gillis, who was mentored in Winston’s workshop and went on to work on seven Predator films, including “Badlands.”

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

Alec Phillips, Goldman Sachs’s chief U.S. political economist, estimated in a Nov. 2 research note that if the shutdown lasts around six weeks, it could reduce quarter-on-quarter annualized real growth in gross domestic product over the final three months of 2025 by 1.15 percentage points, “primarily as a result of federal employee furloughs.”

Read more on MarketWatch