irk
/ɝk/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 2.38 in modern English
7
Scrabble Score
3
Letters
1
Syllables
3
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An annoyance.
name
A river in Greater Manchester, England, which joins the River Irwell in Manchester city centre.
Example Sentences
- "It irks me doing all this work and have someone wreck it."
- "Let no man pray to Māna-Yood-Sushāī, for who shall trouble Māna with mortal woes or irk him with the sorrows of all the houses of Earth?"
- "The trade-off between computation cost and precision results in tuning parameters […] being exposed to the user, a major irk to practitioners of data science."
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English irken (“to tire, grow weary”), from Old Norse yrkja (“to work”), from Proto-Germanic *wurkijaną (“to work”), from Proto-Indo-European *werǵ- (“to work”). Cognate with Icelandic yrkja (“to compose”), Swedish yrka (“to urge, argue”), Old English wyrċan (“to work”). Doublet of work.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ɝk/
- British English: /ɜːk/