Which is the correct usage: “rack my brain” or “wrack my brain”? Google turned up pages with conflicting recommendations.
One argument is that to “rack a brain” comes from the torture device known as a rack.
Another from the now obsolete Yahoo Answers website was 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 Wrack My Brain by Ringo Starr simply have an ungrammatical title or is the error intentional?
I would connect “to rack” as in to rack one’s brain with “to break”. The form wreck is found in shipwreck (German Schiffbruch from verb brechen) and there might easily be a variant where w (from b) has totally vanished. The corresponding German expression for to rack one’s brain is sich das Gehirn zerbrechen.