walk
/woːk/
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: Zipf frequency 5.08 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To move on the feet by alternately setting each foot (or pair or group of feet, in the case of animals with four or more feet) forward, with at least one foot on the ground at all times. Compare run.
Intransitive verb
verb
To "walk free", i.e. to win, or avoid, a criminal court case, particularly when actually guilty.
Colloquial; Intransitive verb
Example Sentences
- "To walk briskly for an hour every day is to keep fit."
- "Athelstan Arundel walked home all the way, foaming and raging. […] His mother lived at Pembridge Square, which is four good measured miles from Lincoln's Inn. He walked the whole way, walking through crowds, and under the noses of dray-horses, carriage-horses, and cart-horses, without taking the least notice of them."
- "Edward Churchill still attended to his work in a hopeless mechanical manner like a sleep-walker who walks safely on a well-known round. But his Roman collar galled him, his cossack stifled him, his biretta was as uncomfortable as a merry-andrew's cap and bells."
- "If you can’t present a better case, that robber is going to walk."
- "If you leave your wallet lying around, it’s going to walk."
- "I walk two miles to school every day."
Etymology
From Middle English walk, walke, walken, walkyn, wolken (“to roll, toss, or turn; to walk; to move; to be living; to beat or full; to perform”), a conflation of Old English wealcan (“to move around; to revolve; to roll; to fluctuate; to discuss”) (ġewealcan (“to go, traverse; to roll”)) and Old English wealcian (“to curl, roll up, twist; to wrinkle”); both from Proto-West Germanic *walkan, from Proto-Germanic *walkaną (“to roll, toss, turn, wind; to walk, wander, wend; to full, trample”), *walkōną (“to roll about; to full”), from Proto-Indo-European *walg- (“to twist, turn, move”). Cognates Cognate with Bavarian woikn (“to full, tan; to knead dough; to roll out dough”), Cimbrian balchan (“to beat, hit, strike”), Dutch zwalken (“to walk around”), German walken (“to full, tan, walk; to knead; to beat up”), Danish valke (“to full, walk, waulk”), Faroese válka (“make dirty; stir up dirt”), Swedish valka (“to full cloth, to waulk”); also Latin valgus (“bent out; bandy, bow-legged”). More at vagrant and whelk. Doublet of waulk.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *welH-, walk, wealcan, wealcian, *walkan, *walkaną
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /woːk/
- British English: /wɔːk/
Usage
Inflected Forms
walks (present, singular)
walking (participle, present)
walked (participle, past)
walked (past)
no-table-tags (table tags)
glossary (inflection template)
walked (first person, past)
walkest (archaic, present)
walked (past, second person)
walkedst (archaic, past)
walketh (archaic, present)
walked (past, singular)