cark
/kɑː(ɹ)k/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 1.48 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
name
A village in Lower Holker parish, South Lakeland district, Cumbria, England (OS grid ref SD3676).
Example Sentences
- "[W]ho vvould not rather Sleep Quietly upon a Hammock, vvithout either Cares in his Head, or Crudities in his Stomach, then lye Carking upon a Bed of State, vvith the Qualms and Tvvinges that accompany Surfeits and Exceſs?"
- "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."
- "[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."
- "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."
- "Why for sluggards cark and moil?"
- "His heauie head, deuoide of carefull carke, / Whose sences all were straight benumbd and starke."
Etymology
From Middle English carken (“to be anxious, worry”, intransitive), from Old English *carcian ("to be sorrowful, worry"; found in becarcian (“to worry about, care for”)), a frequentative form of Old English carian (“to care”), equivalent to care + -k. The Middle English carken, also charken (“to load (sth.); to bear (crops); to burden, harass”, transitive), from Old Northern French carquier (“to load, burden”), from Latin carricāre (“to load”), related to Old French chargier (“to load”), is a different word often confused with the above.