Primary
''ilk'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260320113731-00-⌔
ilk - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Adjective
ilk (not comparable)
- (Scotland and Northern England) Very; same.
- ✤ By semblaunt, was that ilke image1
Noun
ilk (plural ilks)
- A type, race or category; a group of entities that have common characteristics such that they may be grouped together.
- ✤ “Hinkydink” or “Bathhouse John,” or others of that ilk, were proprietors of the most notorious dives in Chicago […]2
- ✤ The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk.3- ✤ On the surface, the film is a globe-trotting gross-out caper in which Nobby, who’s from a hellish version of the titular Lincolnshire town (“twinned with Chernobyl”), is reunited with his long-lost brother Sebastian (Mark Strong), who has become a spy for the British secret services. That makes him a servant of the powers-that-be that have no time for Nobby and his scrounging ilk.4
Etymology
Inherited from Middle English ilke, from Old English ilca, conjectured as from Proto-Germanic ﹡ilīkaz, a compound of ﹡iz and ﹡-līkaz from the noun ﹡līką (“body”).
The sense of “type”, “kind” is from the application of the phrase of that ilk to families: the word thus came to mean family.
Pronunciation
Printed 2026-06-28.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Link to original Footnotes
1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IV”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC: ↩
1905 April–October, Upton Sinclair, chapter XXV, in The Jungle, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 26 February 1906, →OCLC: ↩
1931, Ogden Nash, The Cow: ↩
2016 February 23, Robbie Collin, “Grimsby review: ’ Sacha Baron Cohen’s vital, venomous action movie’”, in The Daily Telegraph (London): ↩
Secondary
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