meek

adj
/miːk/UK/mik/US

Etymology

From Middle English meek, meke, meoc, probably a borrowing from Old Norse mjúkr (“soft; meek”), from Proto-Germanic *meukaz, *mūkaz (“soft; supple”), from Proto-Indo-European *mewg-, *mewk- (“slick, slippery; to slip”); compare Old English smēag (“subtle, stealthy, etc.”) and smūgan. Cognate with Swedish and Norwegian Nynorsk mjuk (“soft”), Norwegian Bokmål myk (“soft”), and Danish myg (“supple”), Dutch muik (“soft, overripe”), dialectal German mauch (“dry and decayed, rotten”), Mauche (“malanders”). Compare as well Welsh mwyth (“soft, weak”), Latin ēmungō (“to blow one's nose”), Tocharian A muk- (“to let go, give up”), Lithuanian mùkti (“to slip away from”), Ancient Greek μύσσομαι (mússomai, “to blow the nose”), Sanskrit मु॒ञ्चति॑ (muñcáti, “to release, let loose”).

  1. derived from *mewg-
  2. derived from *meukaz
  3. derived from mjúkr — “soft; meek
  4. inherited from meek

Definitions

  1. Humble, non-boastful, modest, meager, or self-effacing.

    • Blessed are the meeke: for they shall inherit the earth.
    • Mrs. Wickam was a meek woman...who was always ready to pity herself, or to be pitied, or to pity anybody else...
  2. Submissive, dispirited, cowed.

    • What if they were wolves instead of lambs? They'd eat her all the sooner if she was meek to them. Fight or be eaten.
  3. To tame

    To tame; to break (a horse)

  4. + 2 more definitions
    1. A surname.

    2. An unincorporated community in Holt County, Nebraska, United States.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at meek. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01meek02cowed03submission04submitting05submissive06meekly

A definitional loop anchored at meek. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

6 hops · closes at meek

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

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