See also: Cark and çark

English edit

Pronunciation edit

  • IPA(key): /kɑː(ɹ)k/
  • (file)
  • Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)k

Etymology 1 edit

From Middle English carken, also charken (to be anxious, worry; to load (sth.); to bear (crops)), from Old Northern French carquier (to load, worry), from Latin carricāre (to load). Compare Old French chargier (to load); thus a doublet of charge.[1]

Verb edit

cark (third-person singular simple present carks, present participle carking, simple past and past participle carked)

  1. (obsolete, intransitive) To be filled with worry, solicitude, or troubles.
  2. (obsolete, transitive, intransitive) To bring worry, vexation, or anxiety.
    • 1831, Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible, Comment on 2 Timothy 2: 22:
      Carnal pleasures are the sins of youth: ambition and the love of power, the sins of middle age: covetousness and carking cares, the crimes of old age.
    • 1902, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 3:
      [W]e shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.
    • 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, →OCLC; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., [], [1933], →OCLC, page 0056:
      Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly [on a newspaper] he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.
  3. (intransitive) To labor anxiously.

Noun edit

cark (plural carks)

  1. (obsolete) A noxious or corroding worry.
  2. (obsolete) The state of being filled with worry.
Descendants edit
  • Welsh: carc

Etymology 2 edit

From caulk.

Verb edit

cark (third-person singular simple present carks, present participle carking, simple past and past participle carked)

  1. Pronunciation spelling of caulk.

Etymology 3 edit

Verb edit

cark

  1. See cark it.

References edit

Anagrams edit

Albanian edit

Etymology edit

Variant of thark (enclosure).

Noun edit

cark m

  1. Alternative form of cak

Scots edit

Etymology edit

From Middle English carken. See cark above.

Pronunciation edit

Noun edit

cark (plural carks)

  1. (archaic) worry, anxiety

Verb edit

cark (third-person singular simple present carks, present participle carkin, simple past carkt, past participle carkt)

  1. (archaic) To worry or be anxious.