cark

English

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kɑː(ɹ)k/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)k

Etymology 1

From Middle English carken, also charken (“to be anxious, worry; to load (sth.); to bear (crops)”), from Old Northern French carquier (“to load, worry”), from Latin carricāre (“to load”). Compare Old French chargier (“to load”); thus a doublet of charge.

Verb

cark (third-person singular simple present carks, present participle carking, simple past and past participle carked)

1. (obsolete, intransitive) To be filled with worry, solicitude, or troubles.
2. (obsolete, transitive, intransitive) To bring worry, vexation, or anxiety.
   • 1831, Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible, Comment on 2 Timothy 2: 22:

     Carnal pleasures are the sins of youth: ambition and the love of power, the sins of middle age: covetousness and carking cares, the crimes of old age.

   • 1902, William James, “Lecture 3”, in The Varieties of Religious Experience ‎, London: Longmans, Green & Co.:

     [W]e shall see how in morbid melancholy this sense of the unreality of things may become a carking pain, and even lead to suicide.

   • 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, →OCLC; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., , , →OCLC, page 0056:

     Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly [on a newspaper] he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.

3. (archaic, intransitive) To labor anxiously.
   • 1849, Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke's Song:

     Why for sluggards cark and moil?

Noun

cark (countable and uncountable, plural carks)

1. (obsolete) A noxious or corroding worry.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto I”, in The Faerie Queene. , London: [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 44:

     His heauie head, deuoide of carefull carke, / Whose sences all were straight benumbd and starke.

   • 1832, William Motherwell, They Come! The Merry Summer Months:

     Fling cark and care aside.

   • 1887, R. D. Blackmore, Springhaven:

     Freedom from the cares of money and the cark of fashion.

2. (obsolete) The state of being filled with worry.

Descendants

• → Welsh: carc

Etymology 2

From caulk.

Verb

cark (third-person singular simple present carks, present participle carking, simple past and past participle carked)

1. Pronunciation spelling of caulk.

See also

• cark it

References

• “cark”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• “cark”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.

Anagrams

• RACK, rack

Albanian

Etymology

Variant of thark (“enclosure”).

Noun

cark m

1. Alternative form of cak

Scots

Etymology

From Middle English carken. See cark above.

Pronunciation

• (Southern Scots) IPA^(key): /ˈkɑrk/

Noun

cark (plural carks)

1. (archaic) worry, anxiety

Verb

cark (third-person singular simple present carks, present participle carkin, simple past carkt, past participle carkt)

1. (archaic) To worry or be anxious.