lark
/lɑɹk/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.14 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Any of various similar-appearing birds, but usually ground-living, such as the meadowlark and titlark.
noun
One who wakes early; one who is up with the larks.
noun
A prank.
Example Sentences
- "Charles Randolph Grean is married to pop lark and multi-hit artist Betty Johnson."
- "to go larking"
- "‘Ha! ha!’ laughed Master Bates, ‘what a lark that would be, wouldn’t it, Fagin? I say, how the Artful would bother ’em wouldn’t he?’"
- "“Oh, dear, no,” said the young Englishman; “my cousin was coming over on some business, so I just came across, at an hour’s notice, for the lark.”"
- "Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe’s raised-eyebrow account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” that bohemian lark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture."
- "What began as a lark has grown into something very, very big, inflating the company’s ambitions."
Etymology
From Middle English larke, laverke, from Old English lāwerce, lǣwerce, lāuricæ, from Proto-West Germanic *laiwaʀikā, from Proto-Germanic *laiwazikǭ (compare dialectal West Frisian larts, Dutch leeuwerik, German Lerche), from *laiwaz (borrowed into Finnish leivo, Estonian lõo), of unknown ultimate origin with no definitive cognates outside of Germanic.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: larke, lāwerce, *laiwaʀikā, *laiwazikǭ
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /lɑɹk/
- British English: /lɑːk/
Usage
Subject
Wiktionary places this term in People.