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lark

noun
/lɑːk/UK/lɑɹk/US

Etymology

Uncertain, either * from a northern English dialectal term lake /laik (“to play”) (around 1300, from Old Norse leika (“to play (as opposed to work)”)), with an intrusive -r- as is common in southern British dialects; or * a shortening of skylark (1809), sailors' slang, "play roughly in the rigging of a ship", because the common European larks were proverbial for high-flying; Dutch has a similar idea in speelvogel (“playbird, a person of markedly playful nature”).

  1. inherited from *laiwarikǭ✻
  2. inherited from *laiwarikā✻
  3. inherited from lāwerce
  4. inherited from larke

Definitions

  1. Any of various small, singing passerine birds of the family Alaudidae.

  2. Any of various similar-appearing birds, but usually ground-living, such as the meadowlark…

    Any of various similar-appearing birds, but usually ground-living, such as the meadowlark and titlark.

  3. One who wakes early

    One who wakes early; one who is up with the larks.

  4. ›+ 12 more definitions

    1. A jolly or peppy person.

      • Charles Randolph Grean is married to pop lark and multi-hit artist Betty Johnson.

    2. To catch larks (a type of bird).

      • to go larking

    3. A frolic or romp, some fun.

      • ‘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.

    4. A prank.

    5. To sport, engage in harmless pranking.

      • [T]hey laugh at us old boys,” thought old Pendennis. And he was not far wrong; the times and manners which he admired were pretty nearly gone—the gay young men “larked” him irreverently […]
      • […] the porter at the rail-road had seen a scuffle; or when he found it was likely to bring him in as a witness, then it might not have been a scuffle, only a little larking […]

    6. To frolic, engage in carefree adventure.

    7. A surname transferred from the nickname, from lark as a byname or for a catcher and…

      A surname transferred from the nickname, from lark as a byname or for a catcher and seller of larks.

    8. A surname originating as a patronymic shortened from Larkin, a medieval diminutive of…

      A surname originating as a patronymic shortened from Larkin, a medieval diminutive of Laurence.

    9. A male given name transferred from the surname, of occasional usage.

    10. A female given name from English from the lark bird.

    11. A river in England, on the border between Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

    12. Alternative form of Larak (“island off the coast of Iran”).

The neighborhood

Derived

Beesley's lark, bushlark, calandra lark, crested lark, day lark, gay as a lark, greater short-toed lark, happy as a lark, hoopoe-lark, horned lark, lark bunting, lark buttonquail, larker, larkheel, larklike, lark-plover, lark's-heel, lark sparrow, larkspur, lark's tongue, magpie-lark, meadowlark, mudlark, pink-billed lark, rise with the lark, rising lark, sand lark, scribble lark, sea lark, shore lark, shorelark, skylark, songlark, sparrow-lark, titlark, torrent-lark, up with the lark, woodlark, writing lark, blow this for a lark · +10 more

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for lark. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA