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''harken'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260607174010-00-⌔
harken - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Verb
harken (third-person singular simple present harkens, present participle harkening, simple past and past participle harkened)
- (ambitransitive, chiefly US) Alternative spelling of hearken: to hear, to listen, to have regard.
- ✤ Ev’n from the depths of Hell the Damn’d advance,/Th’Infernal Manſions nodding ſeem to dance;/The gaping three-mouth’d Dog forgets to ſnarl,/The Furies harken, and their Snakes uncurl.1
- ✤ How, then, am I mad? Harken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.2
- ✤ [T]he mother who had shaped him if any had toward the man he almost was, […] whom he had revered and harkened to and loved and lost and grieved: […]3
- (intransitive, US, figuratively) To hark back, to return or revert (to a subject, etc.), to allude to, to evoke, to long or pine for (a past event or era).
- ✤ Bell argued that the manual approach was “backwards,” and harkened to a primitive age where humans used gesture and pantomime.4
Etymology
See hearken
Pronunciation
Printed 2026-06-28.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Link to original Footnotes
1697, Virgil, “The Fourth Book of the Georgics”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC, page 143, lines 690–693: ↩
1843 January, Edgar A[llan] Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, in J[ames] Russell Lowell, R[obert] Carter, editors, The Pioneer. A Literary and Critical Magazine, volume I, number I, Boston, Mass.: Leland and Whiting, […], →OCLC, page 29, column 1: ↩
1942, William Faulkner, “The Bear”, in Go Down, Moses, New York, N.Y.: Random House, →OCLC, section 5, page 326: ↩
2005, Carol Padden, Tom L. Humphries, Inside Deaf Culture, page 48: ↩
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